Project Title
Responsible Development of a Smart Physiotherapy Monitoring System Using Artificial Intelligence
Organizations
Women’s College Hospital; Sunnybrook Research Institute, University of Toronto
Funding
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Doctoral Fellowship Award; Collaborative Health Research Project Special Call: Artificial Intelligence, Health, and Society (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council CPG-163,963).
Project Description
This 3-year embedded ethics study occurred alongside and informed the development of a health-related AI technology undergoing commercialization through a start-up. The technology employed inertial sensors and supervised machine learning for the monitoring and classification of at-home patient physical therapy exercise frequency and technique.
Approach
The study began early in development and testing phases, and involved regular exchanges between the ethics team and development team over the course of three years. Data collection involved:
Semi-structured qualitative interviews
Co-design sessions with patients and physiotherapists
Document and policy review
Exchanges with the team included meetings as well as the development of responsible design deliverables including slide decks introducing our approach, summaries of initial themes arising from qualitative data, and preliminary design principles intended inform responsible implementation of the technology within a program of care.
Results
A Focus on Events in AI for Health: In this paper we suggest that a more expansive design and development lifecycle shaped by key ‘events’ offers a more robust normative approach to analysis of digital health technologies, especially where those technologies’ actual uses are underspecified or in flux.
Status: Published
Proxy Work and the Making of Health Data Markets: In this paper we describe the contingent and contested valuation practices that shaped the technology and the data ‘products’ it generated over time. We suggest that data assetization is an increasingly essential design and marketing activity in and that ‘proxy work’ represents an intermediary between data generation and use, where data become capable of standing in for something else, allowing accountable forms of value to be realized across multiple sites.
Status: Published
Design Requirements for Responsible Implementation: In addition to producing empirical data for scholarly publications and conference presentations, regular exchanges between the ethics team and development team produced a set of responsible design deliverables through a values elicitation exercises. This generated a set of preliminary design requirements intended to inform responsible implementation of the technology within a specific program of care.
Status: Complete