BSN Workshop: From Wearables to Implantables- Socioethical Issues
https://www.bhi-bsn-2019.org/workshops/
Making the Leap from Wearables to Implantables: Socio-Ethical Issues
Katina Michael
Center for Engineering, Policy and Society
School for the Future of Innovation in Society, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Arizona State University
Arizona - USA
Abstract: Ask someone to strap a device to their body for a period of time to monitor their condition and you’re likely to get very little pushback. Tell someone to get a chip injected under their skin and they’ll likely tell you that that’s just going too far. This presentation provides the results of a qualitative study conducted in 2012 on the social and ethical issues raised by everyday citizens for rejecting non-medical implantable devices for control, care and convenience applications. The empirical data (N=2,556) is rendered from citizens from five countries including: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, USA and India. Topics related to human rights and privacy, bodily integrity, surveillance and government control, health risks and safety concerns, religious and ideological positions held, and fear and creepiness factors are just some of the issues raised by respondents who would not consent to an implantable being injected into their body. The discussion will ponder on whether the overwhelming citizen sentiment is likely to change over time or whether industry will forge ahead with experimental humancentric IOT systems, for instance, that address emerging areas like blockchain.
Biography: Katina Michael is the director for the Centre for Engineering, Policy and Society at Arizona State University. She holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Computing, Informatics and Decisions Systems Engineering. Her PhD was on the technological trajectory of automatic identification technologies where she was a pioneer in investigating microchipping humans from a socio-technical systems perspective. Katina has worked previously as a senior network engineer and systems analyst for several transnational companies. She holds qualifications in information technology and the law with a research interest in national security and location-based services. Together with MG Michael she has introduced the term uberveillance into the bioethics literature. She is the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society.
Workshop Overview: Overview: The workshop aims at drawing the state-of-the-art for skin-like technologies by discussing the latest scientific progress and achievements, the open challenges and the opportunities for future directions. As this research area is at the crossroads of several disciplines (including electronics, electromagnetics, mechanics, materials science, chemistry, biology, medicine, ethics) the workshop will offer the opportunity of fruitful contamination among chemical sensors, electromagnetic components and interconnects, energy harvesting and the smart materials and packaging as well as ethical issues.
Citation: Katina Michael, 2019, “Making the Leap from Wearables to Implantables: Socio-ethical Issues”, in Gaetano Marrocco, Sara Amendola, and John A. Rogers: Bio-Integrated Flexible and Stretchable Electronics for Skin Sensor Networks: 16th IEEE EMBS Conference, 19-22 May, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA.