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Social and Ethical Issues in e-Health Technologies

Social and Ethical Issues in Developing and Implementing e-Research and e-Health Technologies

 

Project Start:	1st May 2007
Project End:	30th April 2008
Project Partners:	National Centre for e-Social Science ( Dr. Yuwei Lin ) and Prof. Pau-Choo Chung , Department of Electric Engineering , National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan
Funding Programme:	British Academy and Taiwan National Science Council International Collaboration Project

 

This project is co-funded by the British Academy and Taiwan National Science Council. The aim is to gain a better understanding of ethical and social issues in developing and implementing e-Health and e-Research technologies in different contexts and locales, for example, relating to confidentiality, privacy, data protection, accountability and to trust and risk in distributed collaborations.

Activities and Output:

1. Scoping study. We have been conducting a scoping exercise to identify and compare current law and regulations in place in UK and Taiwan, good and bad practices of acquiring, collecting, using and analysing data. An emphasis has been placed upon video analysis because it is the current shared interest between two partners. Video analysis also bring the ongoing discussion on social and ethical issues to a different level involving different data forms and formats and modalities.

2. Workshop. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 3 rd International e-Social Science Conference at Ann Arbor (USA) on 7 October 2007.

This half-day workshop engaged a mixed group of participants from different disciplines and backgrounds and provided an opportunity for them to share their work and experiences in visual methods .

The workshop has achieved our original goals to:

• improve our understanding of researchers' requirements for new technologies;

• investigate the capacity of tools and techniques for visual methods in social sciences and medical studies;

• discuss the challenges in the development and implementation of the tools and techniques mentioned above (including social, ethical and HCI usability issues);

• develop effective strategies for engaging users (across different disciplines and domains)
  
• provide suggestions for further development and implementation (e.g. automating the analysis of visual data, linking visual data and integrating the visual data with textual and numerical data) (This might lead to international collaboration.)

Workshop Programme and Agenda

Date & Time: 7 October, 9 am - 12 pm

9.00 - 9.10 Introduction and Housekeeping (Terry Hewitt and Yuwei Lin)
            1. What are visual methods and visual data?
            2. State of art technologies for data collection, storage,
               analysis and re/presentation

9.10 - 10.25 Project Presentation
            Presenters: Mike Daw, Pau-Choo Julia Chung + RA, Svenja
            Adolphs, Giulia Battaglia, Jane Carnaffan

10.25- 10.30 break

10.30 -11.00 Agenda formation
            Break-up groups brainstorming key questions regarding
            1) research needs, both from the social scientific perspective
            and the computer science perspective
            2) achievements and challenges
            3) socio-ethical questions.
            Issues ranges from visual data collection, data archiving and
            retrieval, data analysis, data re/presentation, data reuse and
            access to datasets

11.00 - 11.30 break-up discussion for answering the above raised
questions, and exchanging good examples and good practices

11.30 - 11.45 presentation of group discussion

11.45 - 12.00 Wrap-up