Digital Medicine, Cybersecurity, and Ethics: An Uneasy Relationship

摘要

The target article by Klugman and colleagues (2018) has the merit of pointing out, in great detail, which ethical questions will be raised if in the near future sophisticated mobile (and partly implantable) information technology devices are used in health care to monitor patients and to provide targeted therapeutic interventions such as drug applications or neuronal stimulation. Such "self-acting medical devices" (in the following we use the acronym SAMD; "smart pills" are one type of SAMD application) will require sophisticated information technology including sensor, computation, communication, and actor (e.g. drug release systems) capabilities in order to function properly. In our contribution, we complement the "ethical landscape" of Klugman and colleagues by adding an important but often neglected dimension: the cybersecurity of such systems and the ethical issues raised by enforcing it. Our considerations are based on the findings of the ongoing, European Union (EU)- funded project CANVAS (https://canvas-project.eu/canvas) on the ethics of cybersecurity.