PHM-ETHICS · Personalized health monitoring (PHM)- Interdisciplinary research to analyse the relationship between ethics, law and psychosocial as well as medical sciences

The aim of PHM-Ethics is to scientifically analyse the dependencies between ethics, law and psychosocial sciences in a dynamic part of IT development, i.e. personalized health monitoring (PHM), from a European perspective. First, the development of PHM will be reviewed to identify core steps that delineate major changes from an ethical, legal and psychosocial point of view. A taxonomy will be elaborated based on research evidence in each of the disciplines, and interrelations will be documented into a map. The project will be situated at the development phase of new technologies, however also at the early application phase. As a major step, the implementation of ethical constraints contained in EU/ international instruments into the national laws or regulations will be analysed, and gaps will be identified. At the end of project phase 1, the taxonomy will be validated in an international expert workshop. The aims of the second project phase are to develop and test an interdisciplinary methodology that allows assessing PHM technologies regarding their ethical, legal and psychosocial consequences. The interdisciplinary methodology will be pilot-tested on a qualitative basis and validated in selected personal health monitoring applications at different stages of the taxonomy. The objective of the study is to gain scientific input from the patient and provider point of view. Results of an empirical study will be analysed in terms of differences between development stages and socio-demographic factors. The third project phase is related to the exploitation of knowledge and research products, with regard to policy-making and implementation of technological innovations. PHM-Ethics will provide a tool that allows studying future PHM applications on different taxonomic levels concerning their consequences to serve both internal and external dissemination purposes within the 7th framework, also projecting the methodology to other technological field (e.g. the security area).