Research Assistant Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
We conducted a study to better understand how to encourage ethical machine learning (ML) for precision medicine throughout the design process. In this study, we conducted five group exercises with twenty developer participants to assess how their design thinking was influenced by framing the design activity as a research project, development of a clinical tool for a health care system, or development of a clinical tool for their health care system. In each group exercise, participants were asked to consider a series of three hypothetical scenarios in which developers documented their design considerations using a virtual collaborative whiteboard platform. Scenario 1 elicited considerations involved in designing a research project using ML to predict progression of pre-diabetes to diabetes. Scenario 2 elicited considerations in designing a tool to predict the progression for a large health care system. Scenario 3 elicited considerations if developers were also patients at said health care system. Our results suggest that developers more often considered client or user perspectives after changing the context from research to a large healthcare setting. Furthermore, developers were more likely to express concerns arising from the patient perspective and societal and ethical issues after imagining themselves as patients in the health care system. These findings suggest that developers' design considerations can be shaped in the development of ML for precision medicine by encouraging alternative perspective taking. This research could inform creation of educational resources and exercises for developers to better align daily practices with client and patient values and ethical ML design.
Authors: Ariadne Nichol, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; Tehmi den Braven, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; Yuting Zhu, University of Pennsylvania; Matthew Kearney, University of Pennsylvania; Pamela Sankar, University of Pennsylvania; Mildred Cho, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
