Please join MD2K and CORE Principle Investigator Camille Nebeker Ed.D., M.S., at 2 p.m. CT on Thursday, January 26 for Research Ethics in the Digital Age. Click here to join this webinar.
About the Webinar
Digital and Mobile technologies offer the potential to collect unprecedented amounts of real time data in free living environments. We can now monitor location using wearable sensors or by tapping into the global positioning sensors on a smart phone. Moreover, we can infer human behaviors and predict illness by accessing phone and text message logs and mining social networking sites. These data collection methods introduce new ethical and regulatory challenges for both researchers who are using these techniques and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) charged with protecting study participants. Areas of concern focus primarily on the informed consent process, bystander rights and data management. The Connected and Open Research Ethics (CORE) initiative, led by an interdisciplinary research team, is engaging stakeholders in the mobile health or “mHealth” ecosystem to design a platform where by the ethical and regulatory challenges of research using pervasive sensing technologies can be identified and discussed. Results of pilot studies will be presented as will formative research that reveals a demand for dynamic guidance and expertise to evaluate the ethical and regulatory dimensions of research protocols using pervasive sensing strategies. This preliminary and formative research has informed development of the CORE platform designed to assist mHealth stakeholders promote the ethical design and efficient review of research using emerging technologies.
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Originally published on MD2K.org.