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Personal health monitoring: ethical considerations for stakeholders

Anders Nordgren (Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden)

Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society

ISSN: 1477-996X

Article publication date: 12 August 2013

873

Abstract

Purpose

This paper has three purposes: to identify and discuss values that should be promoted and respected in personal health monitoring, to formulate an ethical checklist that can be used by stakeholders, and to construct an ethical matrix that can be used for identifying values, among those in the ethical checklist, that are particularly important to various stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach

On the basis of values that empirical studies have found important to various stakeholders in personal health monitoring, the author constructs an ethical checklist and an ethical matrix. The author carries out a brief conceptual analysis and discusses the implications.

Findings

The ethical checklist consists of three types of values: practical values that a technical product in personal health monitoring must have, quality of life values to be promoted by the development and use of the product, and moral values to be respected in this development and use. To give guidance in practice, the values in the checklist must be interpreted and balanced. The ethical matrix consists of the values in the checklist and a number of stakeholders.

Originality/value

The overall ambition is to suggest a way of categorizing values that can be useful for stakeholders in personal health monitoring. In order to achieve this, the study takes empirical studies as a starting-point and includes a conceptual analysis. This means that the proposals are founded on practice rather than mere abstract thinking, and this improves its usability.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was funded by the European Commission (the project “Personalized Health Monitoring – Ethics” (PHM-Ethics); contract number 230602) and New Tools for Health (VINNOVA, Sweden)[1].

Citation

Nordgren, A. (2013), "Personal health monitoring: ethical considerations for stakeholders", Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 156-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-06-2013-0015

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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