Abstract
The aim of this contribution is to see how interdisciplinary collaboration in the development of medical technologies can enhance ethical reflection on the social and moral impact of new medical devices. On the basis of a so-called “ethical parallel research,” it was investigated how the social impact of a new medical device, based on Ambient Intelligence, could be assessed during the process of technology development. The study indicates that technical researchers tend to make a sharp distinction between technologies and applications; the former supposedly being “neutral.” They framed their own work in terms of neutral technology. This one-sided focus on technology may hamper the assessment of social and moral impact and the prevention of negative side-effects. The case suggests that the assessment of the social and moral impact of new medical devices requires expertise that researchers themselves indicate to be lacking. The involvement of ethicists or social scientists in the development of these devices may encourage technical researchers to bridge the gap between applications and technologies, such as to effectively encourage socially responsible technology development.
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The Brocher Foundation is acknowledged for providing the author the opportunity to work on this paper during her stay at the Centre as visiting researcher in fall 2011.
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- 1.
The following terms are also common: NBIC technologies, where NBIC is an acronym for the convergence of Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, and Cognitive science (originally coined in a report commissioned by the National Science Foundation (Mihail and Bainbridge 2002)).
- 2.
A more elaborate discussion of the methodology of ethical parallel research can be found in Van de Poel and Doorn (2013).
- 3.
In the creation of the ISTAG scenarios both industrial stakeholders and science policy officials were involved (see also http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/istag/home_en.html).
- 4.
Doorn et al. (2013) provides a state-of-the-art volume on interdisciplinary approaches.
- 5.
For a more elaborate description of the project, see Doorn (2012).
- 6.
In order to gain the trust of the project members, some informal meetings and site-visits were attended as well. Trust is indeed an important issue in this kind of research. A combination of personal skills and institutional safeguards is probably required to deal with the challenge of being able to raise critical issues, while at the same time being recognized in the team. In this particular project, it helped that the involved ethicist had an engineering background as well. For a more elaborate discussion of these issues, see Van de Poel and Doorn (2013) and Doorn and Nihlén Fahlquist (2010).
- 7.
It is realized that this description of moral issue is not as well-defined as some philosophers would like it to be. However, since the interviews and the workshop were explicitly aimed at tracing the opinions of the engineers themselves, they were not given any constraints on what counts as a moral issue nor were there any issues introduced that were not mentioned by the engineers themselves. For a more well-wrought description of when a value can be considered a moral value, see Nagel (1979).
- 8.
MVI is the acronym of “Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Innoveren” (in English; responsible innovation). This program, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO, is aimed at multidisciplinary research concentrating on current issues with both scientific and societal relevance. The current chapter is published in the first edited volume published in the framework of this program.
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Doorn, N. (2014). Assessing the Future Impact of Medical Devices: Between Technology and Application. In: van den Hoven, J., Doorn, N., Swierstra, T., Koops, BJ., Romijn, H. (eds) Responsible Innovation 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8956-1_17
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