Project Title

Responsible Development of a Smart Physiotherapy Monitoring System Using Artificial Intelligence

Organization

Women’s College Hospital; Sunnybrook Research Institute

Funding

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada Doctoral Fellowship Award; Collaborative Health Research Project Grant (SSRHC, CIHR, NSERC).

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: 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. Manuscript available here.

Proxy Work and the Making of Health Data Markets: There are contingent and contested valuation practices that shape an AI technology over time. Assetization is an increaingly essential design and marketing activity. ‘Proxy work’ is an intermediary between data generation and assetization, where data become capable of standing in for something else, allowing accountable forms of value to be realized across multiple sites. Manuscript available here.

Project Status

This project is complete.