"From the hippocratic oath to electronic data storage": Ethical aspects for m-health projects in Australia
- Publication Type:
- Conference Proceeding
- Citation:
- Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference e-Health 2009, Part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2009, 2009, pp. 115 - 122
- Issue Date:
- 2009-12-01
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This paper discusses the issue of ethics when it comes to trialling m-health applications in a hospital environment in Australia. Our team has developed a personalised health monitoring application for smart phones using wireless biosensors to monitor and instruct patients. This paper discusses some of the Australian guidelines regarding ethical aspects of running technological trials of such mobile health projects on cardiac patients. Ethical issues regarding mobile health projects can be generally divided in two parts. The first one concerns any potential dangers to the patient's health. Although testing can also be done on healthy test subjects, the best way to acquire real-life test-data is to perform tests on actual cardiac patients. The second one is the privacy aspect in the doctor-patient relationship as some patients do not want to be identified as having a disease or do not want to have their records kept on file and used in scientific publications. Nevertheless, to show the benefits of this personalized m-health monitoring, a technical trial has to be conducted and research data needs to be published in a verifiable way. This paper gives an introduction into ethical regulations, organizations and issues in Australia. It describes, in detail, the issues involved in conducting technical trials in Australian hospitals. The paper gives several recommendations on how to deal with ethics in personalised m-health monitoring projects. © 2009 IADIS.
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