Federica Lucivero

University of Oxford | OX · The Ethox Centre

Background Digital technologies, such as wearable devices and smartphone applications (apps), can enable the decentralisation of clinical trials by measuring endpoints in people’s chosen locations rather than in traditional clinical settings. Digital endpoints can allow high-frequency and sensitive measurements of health outcomes compared to visit-...

Standfirst In order for digital innovations to have a positive role in efforts to make healthcare more environmentally sustainable, it is important to understand the environmental consequences of investment in digital infrastructure, argue Samuel and colleagues.

In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative interview study, which highlights the difficulties and challenges with quantifying carbon emissions and discusses how to move productively through these challenges by drawing insights from studies of deep uncertainty. Our research study focuses on the digital sector and was governed by the follo...

In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative interview study, which highlights the difficulties and challenges with quantifying carbon emissions, and discusses how to move productively through these challenges by drawing insights from studies of deep uncertainty. Our research study focuses on the digital sector and was governed by the rese...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of solidarity has been invoked frequently. Much interest has centred around how citizens and communities support one another during times of uncertainty. Yet, empirical research which accounts and understands citizen’s views on pandemic solidarity, or their actual practices has remained limited. Drawing...

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This paper draws on the ethics of care to investigate how citizens grappled with ethical tensions in the mundane practice of grocery shopping at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. We use this case to address the broader question of what it means ‘to care’ in the context of a crisis. Based on a qualitative longitudinal cross-country interview stud...

The carbon footprint of the world's Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is growing at an alarming rate, giving rise to calls for tools and methodologies for reporting on carbon emissions towards greater accountability within the sector. Accurately calculating the emissions of digital technologies is a complex task where there are no cl...

Introduction Clinical research with remote monitoring technologies (RMTs) has multiple advantages over standard paper-pencil tests, but also raises several ethical concerns. While several studies have addressed the issue of governance of big data in clinical research from the legal or ethical perspectives, the viewpoint of local research ethics com...

Calls for solidarity have been an ubiquitous feature in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we know little about how people have thought of and practised solidarity in their everyday lives since the beginning of the pandemic. What role does solidarity play in people’s lives, how does it relate to COVID-19 public health measures and how...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often cited as a possible solution to current issues faced by healthcare systems. This includes the freeing up of time for doctors and facilitating person-centred doctor-patient relationships. However, given the novelty of artificial intelligence tools, there is very little concrete evidence on their impact on the do...

This paper argues that as we move to redefine global bioethics, there is a need to be attentive to the ethical issues associated with the environmental sustainability of data and digital infrastructures in global health systems. We show that these infrastructures have thus far featured little in environmental impact discussions in the context of he...

The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the [PROJECT NAME] research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among resea...

Artificial Intelligence and associated digital technologies (DTs) have environmental impacts. These include heavy carbon dioxide emissions linked to the energy consumption required to generate and process large amounts of data; extracting minerals for, and manufacturing of, technological components; and e-waste. These environmental impacts are rece...

Introduction: There has been no work that identifies the hidden or implicit normative assumptions on which participants base their views during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their reasoning and how they reach moral or ethical judgements. Our analysis focused on participants' moral values, ethical reasoning and normative positions around the transmissi...

This paper explores ethical debates associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app that occurred in the public news media and broader public policy, and in doing so, takes ethics debate as an object for sociological study. The research question was: how did UK national newspaper news articles and grey literature frame the ethical issues about...

Purpose In April 2020, it was announced that NHSX, a unit of the UK National Health Service (NHS) responsible for digital innovation, was developing a contact tracing app that would offer a digital solution to managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the urgency with which the app was developed, a clear commitment was made to designing the technolog...

Digital phenotyping for mental health is an emerging trend which uses digital data, derived from mobile applications, wearable technologies and digital sensors, to measure, track and predict the mental health of an individual. Digital phenotyping for mental health is a growing, but as yet underexamined, field. As we will show, the rapid growth of d...

The concept of ‘digital phenotyping’ was originally developed by researchers in the mental health field, but it has travelled to other disciplines and areas. This commentary draws upon our experiences of working in two scientific projects that are based at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute – The RADAR-AD project and The Minerva Initiati...

Mobile applications for digital contact tracing have been developed and introduced around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed as a tool to support ‘traditional’ forms of contact-tracing carried out to monitor contagion, these apps have triggered an intense debate with respect to their legal and ethical permissibility, social de...

In order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers around the globe have increasingly invested in digital health technologies to support the 'test, track and trace' approach of containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. These technologies include mobile 'contact tracing' applications (apps), which can trace individuals likely to have come...

The integration of open science as a key pillar of responsible research and innovation has led it to become a hallmark of responsible research. However, ethical, social and regulatory challenges still remain about the implementation of an internationally-and multi-sector-recognised open science framework. In this Commentary, we discuss one importan...

Ethical oversight of AI research is beset by a number of problems. There are numerous ways to tackle these problems, however, they leave full responsibility for ethical reflection in the hands of review boards and committees. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution: the training of ethically responsible AI researchers. We showcase this so...

The current COVID-19 outbreak clearly presents novel challenges, both in terms of difficulties for maintaining public health but also in assuring that governmental responses are ethically sound and honour, as best as possible, fundamental human rights. Conflicts between values are arising, and in responding to the crisis public officials will have...

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of infection containment in post-lockdown societies around the globe. This paper discusses a number of questions that should be addressed when assessing the ethical challenges of mobile applications for digital contact-tracing of COVID-19: Which safeguards s...

This paper addresses a problem that has so far been neglected by scholars investigating the ethics of Big Data and policy makers: that is the ethical implications of Big Data initiatives’ environmental impact. Building on literature in environmental studies, cultural studies and Science and Technology Studies, the article draws attention to the phy...

Background: eHealth promises to increase self-management and personalised medicine and improve cost-effectiveness in primary care. Paired with these promises are ethical implications, as eHealth will affect patients’ and primary care professionals’ (PCPs) experiences, values, norms, and relationships. Objectives: We argue what ethical implications...

Technology assessment (TA) is an analytic and interactive practice that produces evaluative judgments about the societal implications of technology. Despite this distinct evaluative disposition, “normativities” inherent in TA programs and practices often remain hidden. Therefore, TA practice and outcomes often overlook a range of methodological, et...

Purpose The research question is: what are older adults’ experiences of shared decision making (SDM) in a healthcare setting? This involved exploring older adults’ experiences and opinions of decision making in a healthcare setting, and understanding what SDM means to older adults. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach...

Mobile health (mHealth) is rapidly being implemented and changing our ways of doing, understanding and organising healthcare. mHealth includes wearable devices as well as apps that track fitness, offer wellness programmes or provide tools to manage chronic conditions. According to industry and policy makers, these systems offer efficient and cost-e...

The dominant, individualistic understanding of autonomy that features in clinical practice and research is underpinned by the idea that people are, in their ideal form, independent, self-interested and rational gain-maximising decision-makers. In recent decades, this paradigm has been challenged from various disciplinary and intellectual directions...

Increasing numbers of patients have direct access to their electronic health records (EHRs). Proponents of direct access argue that it empowers patients by making them more informed and offering them more control over their health and care. According to some proponents of patients’ access to EHRs, clinicians’ concerns about potential negative impli...

Robots are slowly, but certainly, entering people’s professional and private lives. They require the attention of regulators due to the challenges they present to existing legal frameworks and the new legal and ethical questions they raise. This paper discusses four major regulatory dilemmas in the field of robotics: how to keep up with technologic...

Throughout many parts of the world, biomedical research ethics is based on a core body of well-established norms, rules, and principles, including the Declaration of Helsinki, the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects (1). The overarching goal of these codificat...

“A world without patients”: this is the motto of the Arizona State University spin-off company manufacturing microchips for research on “Immunosignatures”. By its developers, immunosignatures (ImSg) are presented as a “technological revolution” able to transform diagnostics and improve the American healthcare system. How is the plausibility of thes...

When a scientific and technological field is still emerging, promises of its social desirability and warnings about its potential negative effects are wide spread. The dawn of the Human Genome Project (HGP) is an exemplar in this respect. The high expectations that emerged from the early stage of genomics research have been drastically deflated whi...

In summarizing the main contributions of the book, this last chapter examines in what ways the approach discussed so far addresses the question, articulated in Chap. 1, of how to integrate normative sensitiveness in TA. It demonstrates in what way addressing the question of plausibility allows ethicists (as well as social scientists, bioethical com...

Building on the analyses provided in Chaps. 3 and 4, this chapter establishes that general claims regarding the desirability of an emerging technology appear to often draw on a superficial unifying rhetoric of supposedly shared values. The discourses on the desirability of the Nanopil implicitly or explicitly refer to a number of values – autonomy,...

Between 2009 and 2011, TV, national newspapers, magazines, and a children’s book presented images of the “Nanopil”. A device designed to function as a miniaturized lab within the human body, the Nanopil is expected to test the presence of biomarkers for colorectal cancer and transmit the result to an outside receiver. As the first of three chapters...

This chapter addresses the questions pertaining to the analysis of expectations around the use of emerging technologies. As in the previous chapter, the Nanopil – an emerging artifact for colorectal cancer screening – offers a case study to address the central question of this chapter. The concept of a “fictive script” is introduced as a useful ana...

The mandate to the assessment of new technologies has been evolving for the last four decades according to societal and political contexts. As such, this chapter explains evolving trends towards more participatory and deliberative models of Technology Assessment (hereafter TA) and increasingly broader sets of aspects (beyond efficiency and health i...

This chapter addresses the question of how the analysis of expectations’ plausibility, described in the previous chapters, contributes to the goal of fostering a democratic deliberation on the normative acceptability of emerging technologies (outlined in Chap. 1). Building on pragmatist ethics approaches, the normative ideal of democratic deliberat...

This book systematically addresses the issue of assessing the normative nature of visions of emerging technologies in an epistemologically robust way. In the context of democratic governance of emerging technologies, not only it is important to reflect on technologies’ moral significance, but also to address their emerging and future oriented chara...

A World Medical Association (WMA) work group chaired by the Icelandic Medical Association has recently developed a draft guideline in the form of a “DECLARATION ON ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING HEALTH DATABASES AND BIOBANKS” (http://www.wma.net/en/20activities/10ethics/15hdpublicconsult/). This is a response to the WMA DRAFT DECLARATION by the “...

Consumer genomics and mobile health provide health-related information to individuals and offer advice for lifestyle change. These ‘technologies for healthy lifestyle’ occupy an ambiguous space between the highly regulated medical domain and the less regulated consumer market. We argue that this ambiguity challenges implicit distinctions between wh...

In this article the authors explore the various ways in which robot behaviour is regulated. A distinction is drawn between imposing regulations on robots, imposing regulation by robots, and imposing regulation in robots. Two angles are looked at in depth: regulation that aims at influencing human behaviour and regulation whose scope is robots' beha...

Robots are slowly, but certainly, entering people’s professional and private lives. They require the attention of regulators due to the challenges they present to existing legal frameworks and the new legal and ethical questions they raise. This paper discusses four major regulatory dilemmas in the field of robotics: how to keep up with technologic...

New technologies create new divides between the haves and the have-nots, thereby contributing to the creation of new or entrenchment of existing inequalities. This makes the issue of 'fair access' more complex. In this contribution, we propose to shift the conceptual and normative frame that is used in political theory debate concerning the 'digita...

Emerging technologies raise hopes and concerns about their potential consequences for societies. How will neurotechnologies affect our social standards of normality? How will new diagnostic technologies change the doctor-patient relationship? How should we deal with the privacy issues raised by biobanking? How will the data flow in brain-computer i...

Point-of-care devices can be expected to change current medical practices, create new ones and raise crucial questions concerning responsibilities in healthcare. In this paper we explore the issue of point-of-care devices and trust. More specifically, we draw attention on a dimension of ‘trust’ which is closely related to point of care devices, nam...

In recent years, several authors have argued that the desirability of novel technologies should be assessed early, when they are still emerging. Such an ethical assessment of emerging technologies is by definition focused on an elusive object. Usually promises, expectations, and visions of the technology are taken as a starting point. As Nordmann a...

The ethical monitoring of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) is discussed in connection with the potential impact of BMIs on distinguishing traits of persons, changes of personal identity, and threats to personal autonomy. It is pointed out that philosophical analyses of personhood are conducive to isolating an initial thematic framework for this ethi...