Ethical issues and IBM tour

This week we had once again the opportunity to progress on different matters regarding our report. 

First of all, on Monday, we were able to set up a meeting with Stéphane Tirard, doctor of epistemology and history of sciences in the university of Nantes. We wanted to have a discussion about the approval of the concept of a connected house by the population and about hypothetical changes in people’s behaviour. The main purpose of this meeting was to develop certain parts of the report, especially parts related to ethical issues and change management. During the discussion, Stéphane Tirard first explained that there were no major issues regarding the approval of such technologies in people’s homes, in particular with our latest perimeter’s restriction that limits our study to sick people only. However, according to him, the main question is: Do we know whether or not medical teams would manage to process all this data and include those new technologies in their way of working? As a matter of fact, it is nowadays technologically possible to harvest and to process gigantic amounts of data with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), nevertheless there seems to be an inevitable issue concerning the human factor, that is to say the medical teams that would be in charge with processing all of this data. We need to be sure that there is enough manpower to process the collected data. 

After this meeting we studied the care cycle that would be created by the introduction of the connected house in today’s healthcare. The study of this cycle includes every step from the installation of the objects in the connected house to the intervention of the medical team after an alert. We focused our study on the post-treatment phase by the AI regarding the intervention of the medical team.

Then, we went onto our comprehensive list of questions that need to be answered for our report regarding the following themes: economics, politics, philosophy, ethics, legal, medical, doctor-patient relationship, technology, and data safety. 

Finally, we visited IBM France’s headquarters near Paris. Out there we were able to meet some of our contributors to talk about our project and the vision of IBM regarding the medical field. In the afternoon we followed the IBM INSIDE course along with other students, in which we learned more about tomorrow’s healthcare thanks to several conferences and workshops with for instance, the IBM Watson Health system or the creation of a project in response to the ageing global population.