Center for Practical Bioethics: Leaving Patients to Their Own Devices: Will 24/7 AI Health Apps Make Us Healthier?

Do you monitor your heart rate, blood oxygen or sleep on a smart watch or track your walks, bike rides and runs on a smart phone? 

Direct-to-consumer health apps like these are increasingly popular because they presumably:

• Provide cheap, user friendly, 24/7 access to personal health information
• Allow users to manage their own health with the information
• Help users ask doctors the right questions
• Give users “self-knowledge through numbers" 

But they also raise concerns:

• Blind trust in technology and algorithms that have not gone through rigorous testing 
• Limited evidence of clinical value or even accuracy
• Data collection outside of clinical settings changing the meaning of autonomy, privacy and well-being
• Corporations increasingly owning and sharing our personal and health data
• Potential impact on therapeutic relationships and health systems

Anita Ho, PhD, MPH, will present the Center's 30th Annual Rosemary Flanigan Lecture on September 30, 7:00 PM at Saint Joseph Medical Center, 1000 Carondelet Drive, Kansas City, MO. Dr. Ho will weigh pros and cons of AI in personal healthcare to help you understand ethics implications and make informed decisions about using AI healthcare apps and devices.

Dr. Ho is a bioethicist with unique combined academic training and experience in philosophy, clinical/organizational ethics, public and global health, and business. She is a Clinical Professor at University of British Columbia Centre for Applied Ethics and Associate Professor at University of California, San Francisco Bioethics Program. She is also the Vice President in Ethics for CommonSpirit Health in California, an elected fellow of The Hastings Center, and a Center for Practical Bioethics Board Member. Her recent book, Live Like Nobody is Watching: Relational Autonomy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Monitoring, was published by Oxford Press in May 2023.

More information on registration to come.