“The Algorithm Will See You Now”: Exploring the Implications of
Algorithmic Decision-making in Connected Health
Noel Carroll
1,2
, Ita Richardson
1,3,4
and Raja Manzar Abbas
1,3
1
Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre, Ireland
2
Business Information Systems, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland
3
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
4
ARC – Ageing Research Centre, HRI- Health Research Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Keywords: Algorithm, Algorithmic Decision-making, Connected Health, Artificial Intelligence.
Abstract: Despite abundant literature theorizing on Connected Health innovations to support decision-making, the
extant literature provides sparse coverage on users’ awareness of algorithmic decision-making. As a result,
little is known regarding the role of algorithmically generated insights which directly influence clinical
decisions nor the consequences of distancing clinicians and patients from decision-making capabilities.
Indeed, recent studies highlight the growing emphasis on algorithmic decision-making but there is a need to
raise questions as to how this is impacting on the risk and quality of delivering care. In this article, a summary
of key concerns from the literature is provided, and a discussion on the implications of algorithmic decision-
making in Connected Health is presented. In addition, a research roadmap is presented to draw more research
focus on the role of algorithmically generated insights in Connected Health.
1 INTRODUCTION
Fuelled by ongoing discussions on advancements in
technology and data science to facilitate algorithmic
decision-making, there is a growing body of literature
that expresses the need to explore its implications.
Burrell (2016; p.1) argues that “opacity seems to be
at the very heart of new concerns about ‘algorithms’
among legal scholars and social scientists” but we
need to focus the discourse on getting inside the
algorithms themselves.
An algorithm may be defined as a process or set
of rules to calculate or solve a problem which is
typically carried out by a computer. Therefore,
algorithms can be viewed as a set of step-by-step
instructions to achieve a desired result in a finite
number of moves (Orlikowski and Scott 2015) which
act on data. Using data as input, algorithms produce
an output; for example, a risk classification for a loan,
or whether an email should be considered as spam.
Burrell (2016; p.1) explains that algorithms “are
opaque in the sense that if one is a recipient of the
output of the algorithm (the classification decision),
rarely does one have any concrete sense of how or
why a particular classification has been arrived at
from inputs”. Indeed, technological advances
continues to mask our ‘black box society’ through
powerful yet unnoticed algorithms that control how
data is collected and processed to present information
and ultimately influence decision-making.
While there has been much speculation around the
role of technology giants in recent years in collecting
all kinds of data about citizens and how the so-called
surveillance capitalism is creating another layer of
secrecy across society and trust in software solutions,
awareness for similar implications in algorithmic
decision-making goes undocumented. Yet, the
implications of ubiquitous and pervasive digital
technologies for healthcare and public health are
profound (Lupton 2014).
In this article, we examine some of the
assumptions around the role of algorithmically
generated insights which influence healthcare
decisions through Connected Health innovation.
2 CONNECTED HEALTH
Connected health is a socio-technical model for
healthcare management and delivery by using
technology to provide healthcare services. The
Connected Health phenomena (Carroll, 2016; Carroll
758
Carroll, N., Richardson, I. and Abbas, R.
“The Algorithm Will See You Now”: Exploring the Implications of Algorithmic Decision-making in Connected Health.
DOI: 10.5220/0009178507580765
In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2020) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF, pages 758-765
ISBN: 978-989-758-398-8; ISSN: 2184-4305
Copyright
c
2022 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
et al. 2016a) have continued to grow for several
reasons including, the growth in mobile phone
devices, increased availability of mobile applications
(‘app’) technologies, improved Internet connectivity,
growing availability of personal and health-related
data, and growing pressures on healthcare providers
to seek alternative means to deliver healthcare
services. Thus, ‘Connected Health’ is a term that is
used to encompass the wide range of technologies
that are used for healthcare such as digital health
(Lupton, 2014), eHealth (Oh, 2005), mHealth
(Gagnon et al. 2015), health informatics (Coiera,
2015) and health education (Glanz, 2008).
Connected Health technologies are now explicitly
designed for medical and health purposes (Carroll and
Richardson, 2016a), contributing to the digital health
phenomenon that has recently emerged and many of
which are controlled by specific algorithmic decision-
making techniques. Connected Health technologies
may bring other benefits, such as standardized care,
and greater control over the delivery of care.
Algorithmic decision-making through Connected
Health technologies give significant benefits, ranging
from improved diagnosis, thereby delivering better
patient care and improving the support of clinical
decision-making. This enhances hospital
productivity, lowers costs, and reduces medication
errors (Aron et al., 2011). Algorithmic decision-
making in healthcare ought to be viewed as critically
important whereby decision-making can have
significant consequences, including potentially fatal
outcomes, on the quality and safety of care.
In essence, Connected Health is far reaching and
focuses on the convergence of digital technologies
with health, healthcare, living, and society to enhance
the efficiency of healthcare delivery and make
medicine more personalized and precise. To enhance
the efficiency of healthcare delivery, this places more
emphasis on the role of algorithms to gather data and
encapsulate a process or set of rules to be followed in
calculations or other problem-solving operations
(Gruber, 2019), for example, through Connected
Health technologies, yet little research has explored
the implications of algorithmic decision-making in
Connected Health and its impact on decision-making.
2.1 Decision Making in Healthcare
The crucial element of high-quality care in healthcare
is the accuracy, efficacy, and expediency of clinical
decision-making. It is important, therefore, that we
understand both its importance and the range of
strategies that are used to make decisions (Croskerry,
2002). Technological advances have encouraged the
development of new technologies that drive
connectivity across the healthcare sector such as
software apps, gadgets and systems that personalise,
track, and manage care using just-in-time information
exchanged through various patient and community
connections (Leroy et al., 2014; Carroll, 2016). This
paradigm shift has contributed to advancing
healthcare practice, highlighting our growing reliance
and need for algorithmic decision-making to support
healthcare decisions due to technological
advancements such as with artificial intelligence (AI).
For example, research explains how the performance
of AI algorithms can be highly dependent on the
population used in the training sets (for example,
algorithm training and testing for cancer screening) to
ensure that the results are broadly applicable (Topol,
2019).
The outcome of algorithmic decision has
significant implications when individual find
themselves at an intersection of medicinal
possibilities, diverging pathways have extraordinary
and significant results with lasting ramifications.
These include, for instance, decision-making in major
surgeries, prescriptions to be taken for the rest of a
patient’s life, and screening and symptomatic tests
that can trigger upsetting interventions. But, while
there have been benefits, there have been several high
profiles and costly technology failures within
healthcare in recent years, leading to the importance
of having a published and defined algorithmic
decision-making structure to decrease the risk of
failures (Lepri et al. 2017).
3 ‘BLACK BOX SOCIETY’:
ALGORITHMIC DECISION-
MAKING IN CONNECTED
HEALTH
The last decade has witnessed the widespread
diffusion of digitized devices that have the ability to
monitor the minutiae of our everyday lives (Hedman
et al., 2013) enabling data to flow across devices
guided by algorithms to shape information and make
decisions and predictions about individuals by
recognizing complex patterns in complex datasets.
3.1 Promoting the “Right to
Explanation”
Governments have made increasing efforts to protect
citizens’ rights within the digital world. For example,
the European Union’s General Data Protection
“The Algorithm Will See You Now”: Exploring the Implications of Algorithmic Decision-making in Connected Health
759
Regulation (GDPR) provides data protection and
privacy for all individual citizens of the European
Union and the European Economic Area – which
extends to the use of algorithms. Regardless, the use
of algorithmic decisions in an increasingly wide range
of applications has led some scepticism around
technology companies and their growing dominance
in our so-called ‘black-box society’ (Pasquale, 2015).
As a result, there has been growing demands for
increased transparency in algorithmic decision-
making. However, the regulatory requirements
around transparency are often unclear and are open to
some interpretation; for example, in GDPR
(Goodman and Flaxman, 2017). Goodman and
Flaxman (2017) explain that regulation efforts such
as GDPR place restrictions on automated individual
decision-making (that is, algorithms that make
decisions based on user-level predictors) that
“significantly affect” users. GDPR also presents a
requirement on the “right to explanation”. As outlined
in Articles 13 and 14, when profiling takes place, a
data subject has the right to “meaningful information
about the logic involved”. Goodman and Flaxman
(2017) explain that this requirement prompts the
question: what does it mean, and what is required, to
explain an algorithm's decision?
There have been efforts to categorise barriers to
transparency. For example, Burrell (2016)
distinguishes between three broad barriers to
transparency we can associate with algorithms: (1)
opacity as intentional corporate or state secrecy, i.e.
where decision-making procedures are kept from
public scrutiny (2) opacity as technical illiteracy, i.e.
simply having access to underlying code is
insufficient, and (3) opacity that arises from the
characteristics of machine learning algorithms and
the scale required to apply them usefully, i.e. a
mismatch between human reasoning and styles of
interpretation and machine capabilities. Such barriers
to transparency have far reaching consequences
across many sectors, especially in healthcare, where
one can view it as an evolving critical decision-
making system whereby decision often leads to “life
or death” outcomes.
3.2 Connected Health as a Safety
Critical Decision-making System
Critical systems are systems where failure or
malfunction will lead to significant negative
consequences (Lyu, 1996). These systems may have
strict requirements for security and safety to protect
the user or others (Leveson, 1986). By safety critical,
we refer to system failure may lead to loss of life or
serious personal injury. This is particularly important
within a healthcare context where we may view
Connected Health as an extension of a safety critical
decision-making system.
Within the healthcare sector, the complexity of
delivering healthcare services is becoming less clear.
This presents new implications for patients,
clinicians, and the wider society, given that decisions
are increasingly automated, and decision-making
algorithms may not always be transparent. Within a
healthcare system, many decisions are made by
human beings as a result of interpreting medical data
and images generated by computer algorithms.
Healthcare innovations such as Connected Health
promise to increase accuracy and reduce human bias
in important decisions. Specifically, within a
Connected Health context, algorithmic decision-
making occurs when data are collected through
digitized devices carried by individuals such as
smartphones and technologies with inbuilt sensors
built – and subsequently processed by algorithms,
which are then used to make (data-driven) decisions.
Decisions are typically based on relationships
identified in patterns of data - yet decision-makers
often ignore or are not fully aware of why such
relationships may be present (Mayer-Schonberger
and Cukier, 2013). In addition, non-clinical
professionals, such as software engineers and data
scientists are typically tasked with developing
Connected Health solutions. Without clinical input,
they may be misinformed on healthcare best practice,
medicine management, or simply reinforce existing
biases and disparities under the guise of algorithmic
neutrality (Carroll and Richardson, 2016a).
3.3 Connected Health Data-driven
Decisions
In Connected Health, the phrase “data-driven
decision-making” is used, which often alludes to
describe how healthcare organisations integrate
objective information to inform and improve all sorts
of decisions. Data-driven decisions made through
digital devices are promoted and trusted on the basis
of providing personalised insights on individual
behaviour and health status. They also result in the
narrowing of their choices while the diffusion of
Connected Health devices become normalised across
society. However, as clinical practice increasingly
adopts Connected Health solutions, we continue to
distance clinicians and patients form the mechanics of
the decision-making process. Thus, there is a growing
power of the algorithm to influence the provision of
care, for example, whereby (often untrained) software
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760
developers and data scientists play a key and
influential role in the provision of healthcare. This
raises significant concerns and there is a need to re-
examine assumptions around this. Furthermore,
ethics and potential unwanted consequences must be
considered.
3.4 Risks of Algorithmic
Decision-making
Research indicates that users expect that algorithms
will help human decision-makers to avoid their own
prejudices by adding consistency to make decisions
(Zerilli et al. 2018). However, algorithms introduce
new risks which often go undocumented as more
focus is placed on the Connected Health innovation
and devices. Algorithms can replicate institutional
and historical biases, amplifying disadvantages
lurking in data points like such as health status ratings
or scores (Coiera, 2019; Ransbotham et al., 2016).
Even if algorithms remove some subjectivity from the
care pathways, humans are still very much involved
in final decisions. Arguments that cast “objective”
algorithms as fairer and more accurate than fallible
humans fail to fully recognise that in most cases, both
play a role particularity in safety critical healthcare
decisions.
On a wider societal level, and arguably a less
critical impact, another element of Connected Health
promotion that has been led by consumers is self-
tracking and new innovations which support mobile
devices and associated software that can monitor and
measure many aspects of bodily functions and
activities and geolocation details. Algorithmic
decision-making across Connected Health devices
reports on a myriad of body functions, sensations and
indicators ranging from blood glucose, body weight
body mass index and physical activity, which are
monitored through wearable and internal sensors and
collected to support decision-making processes. Yet,
algorithmic decision-making means that
discriminations are increasingly being made by an
algorithm, with few individuals actually
understanding what is included in the algorithm or
even why. Criado Perez (2019) argues, for example,
that many such algorithms are based on men-only
data, although outputs are used by women. In other
words, it is seen as being sufficient that an algorithm
is successfully predictive, never mind if the reasons
for the associations found in the data from different
sources are unknown. We argue that this is likely to
create problems when no one in a healthcare system,
for example, a hospital context, really understands
why some decisions are made nor how they were
influenced based on Connected Health algorithms.
4 THE NEXT WAVE OF
ALGORITHMIC
DECISION-MAKING IN
CONNECTED HEALTH
The importance of exploring the implications of
algorithmic decision-making in Connected Health
will be further realised by the growth of AI and
machine learning. AI refers to the simulation of
human intelligence in machines that are programmed
to think like humans and mimic their actions such as
learning and problem-solving. Machine learning is an
application of AI that provides systems with the
ability to automatically to learn from experience.
Therefore, machine learning allows systems to adjust
to new inputs and perform human-like tasks through
algorithms and statistical models that perform a
specific task without using explicit instructions and
rely on patterns and inference instead.
Hollis et al. (2019) explains that with more health
data availability, and the recent developments of
efficient and improved machine learning algorithms,
there is a renewed interest for AI in healthcare. In
general, the objective of adopting AI in healthcare is
to help health professionals improve patient care
while also reduce costs. However, the other costs of
AI, including ethical issues when processing personal
health data by algorithms, should be considered
(Hollis et al. 2019).
AI and machine learning are continuing to
currently dominate research efforts in healthcare
(Gruber, 2019), from planning to care pathway
recommendations to predictive analytics. There are
emerging research trends which demonstrate how
healthcare providers can exploit the use of AI for
getting routine results at a faster rate, health insurers
can better understand risk assessments, and respond
to patient contact call centres and automate drug
dispensary in hospital pharmacy. However,
algorithms are often trained on “data sets that are
riddled with data gaps” (Criado Perez, 2019, p xii),
and as they are often ‘black-box’ systems, users
cannot identify nor take these into account when
supporting our decisions. While technological
advancements such as AI present a new
transformative power in algorithmic decision-
making, research calls for a regulatory framework
related to Software-as-a-Medical-Device (Carroll and
Richardson, 2016b). This is important to provide a
“The Algorithm Will See You Now”: Exploring the Implications of Algorithmic Decision-making in Connected Health
761
new approach for Connected Health technologies to
offer a more tailored fit to healthcare needs.
5 A RESEARCH ROADMAP
This section summarises some of the main research
gaps on the implications of algorithmic decision-
making in Connected Health and presents a research
roadmap. Scholars are encouraged to consider the
following seven key research themes, namely: (i)
ethical implications; (ii) open science implications;
(iii) accountability and responsibility implications;
(iv) ageing implications; (v) data literacy
implications; (vi) healthcare professional skills gap;
and (vii) regulatory implications associated with
algorithmic decision-making in Connected Health.
5.1 Ethical Implications
Technological advancements such as IoT, AI,
machine learning and cloud technology, has been one
of the most important trends over the past couple
years. AI promises to transform society on the scale
of the industrial, technical, and digital revolutions
before it and will accelerate solutions to large-scale
problems in myriad of fields, including healthcare. In
addition, IoT technologies are increasingly infusing
our lives as the interplay of people, computing, data,
and things is continuously evolving. Thus, IT
innovation has been developing at astonishing speeds
since its inception, often rapidly changing healthcare
in new and quite unexpected forms. This raises new
concerns around ethical implications. For example,
Coiera (2019) explains that while AI will be applied
to classic pattern recognition tasks such as diagnosis
or treatment recommendation, it is likely to be as
disruptive to clinical work as it is to care delivery. In
addition, digital scribe systems that use AI to
automatically create electronic health records
promise great efficiency for clinicians but may lead
to potentially very different types of clinical records
and workflows.
Other examples include radiology, whereby AI is
likely to see image interpretation become an
automated process with diminishing human
engagement. Thus, there needs to more focus on
machine ethics in Connected Health with a view to
investigate the role of artificial moral agents, robots
or artificially intelligent computers that behave
morally or as though moral and indeed challenge the
idea that AI can itself be held accountable. Thus, the
research question arises: What are the ethical
considerations for algorithmic decision-making
within a Connected Health context?
5.2 Open Science Implications
Open Science is the practice of science in such a way
that others can collaborate and contribute, where
research data and other research processes are freely
available, under terms that enable reuse,
redistribution and reproduction of the research and its
underlying data and methods. Amidst these activities
however, it is worth noting that the Open Science
movement is still not universally welcome (Osborne,
2015).
Among the issues raised against Open Science are
worries that the movement can unleash into the public
domain unprecedented amount of materials beyond
our capacity to process them, thereby degrading the
peer review quality and adding more stress on the
discoverability and spread of new knowledge.
However, many scientists surveyed by Mann et al.
(2009), identified with Open Science in principle, but
have not made any action plan to share their data and
software tools because the existing research funding
and evaluation structures offer no incentives to justify
the extra efforts to circulate their resources. Paton and
Kobayashi (2019) explain the ecosystem of software
development, data sharing, education, and research in
the AI community has, in general, adopted an Open
Science ethos that has driven much of the recent
innovation and adoption of new AI techniques.
However, within the healthcare domain, adoption
may be inhibited by the use of “black-box” systems,
where only the inputs and outputs of those systems
are understood, and clinical effectiveness and
implementation studies are missing.
As Connected Health and clinical decision
support systems begin to be implemented in
healthcare systems around the world, further
openness of clinical effectiveness and mechanisms of
action may be required by safety-conscious
healthcare policy-makers to ensure they are clinically
effective in real world use. This leads to a research
question: How can Open Science present an action
plan to be transparent on algorithmic decision-
making within a Connected Health context?
5.3 Accountability and Responsibility
Implications
Accountability serves to ensure responsible
development and use of algorithmic systems such that
they improve human rights and benefit society
(Nissenbaum, 1994). An important difference
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between transparency and accountability is that
accountability is primarily a legal and ethical
obligation on an individual or organisation to account
for its activities, accept responsibility for them, and to
disclose the results in a transparent manner.
Transparency, logs of data provenance, code changes
and other record keeping are important technical
tools, but ultimately accountability depends on
establishing clear chains of responsibility.
Accountability ultimately lies with a (legal) person
(Cooper, 2011).
Automated decision-making algorithms are now
used throughout industry and government,
underpinning many processes. Given that such
algorithmically informed decisions have the potential
for significant societal impact, software developers
and product managers design and implement
algorithmic systems in publicly accountable ways.
Accountability in this context includes an obligation
to report, explain, or justify algorithmic decision-
making as well as mitigate any negative social
impacts or potential harms.
Koene et al. (2019) present an EU initiative for a
governance framework for algorithmic accountability
and transparency. They describe how algorithmic
systems are increasingly being used as part of
decision-making processes in both the public and
private sectors, with potentially significant
consequences for individuals, organisations and
societies as a whole. Koene et al. (2019) draw focus
on how the same properties of scale, complexity and
autonomous model inference, however, are linked to
increasing concerns that many of these systems are
opaque to the people affected by their use and lack
clear explanations for the decisions they make. This
lack of transparency increases the risk of undermining
meaningful scrutiny and accountability. This is a
significant concern when these systems are applied as
part of decision-making processes that can have a
considerable impact on people’s human rights (e.g.
allocation of health and social service resources). We
posit the research question: What governance
structures are required to ensure accountability and
responsible use of algorithmic systems within a
Connected Health context?
5.4 Ageing Implications
Societal, demographic and economic changes have
encouraged us to reconsider how we deliver health
and social care to older people and their families in
our communities (Carroll et al., 2016b). The
worldwide increase in the ageing population presents
an urgent need for new technologies to improve the
quality of life for the elderly. In recent years we have
seen the rapid development of healthcare
technologies along with the widespread use of the
Internet, mobile technologies, data analytics and
artificial intelligence in healthcare – moving towards
more personalized care. However, we must also
consider how do algorithms consider the age and
changing healthcare needs of patients. Our research
question becomes: How can we ensure that
algorithmic decision-making aligns with the
complexity of longevity, i.e. an ageing population
within a Connected Health context?
5.5 Data Literacy and Intelligence
Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyse,
and argue with data. Much like literacy as a general
concept, data literacy focuses on the competencies
involved in working with data. For example, at best
current science on various machine learning methods
described artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), i.e. the
first level of intelligence created by humans. This
implies that algorithms are useful in recognising
patterns and gleaning topics from blocks of text or
deriving the meaning of whole documents from a few
sentences. With increasing efforts to achieve artificial
general intelligence (AGI) to abstract concepts from
limited experience and transferring knowledge
between domains and then moving towards
superintelligence, this has the potential to allow
machines to demonstrate some level of consciousness
(Goertzel, 2014). There are limited studies which
consider how to exploit the rich body of medical
evidence to develop frameworks for conceptualising
the algorithm itself and support clinical teams,
beyond decision support systems (O’Leary et al.
2014). This raises the question: What are the key
requirements between data literacy and intelligence
on algorithmic decision-making for stakeholders
within a Connected Health context?
5.6 Healthcare Professionals Skills Gap
Healthcare education is continually evolving to meet
the global healthcare needs of society. While there are
inherent links between healthcare professionals
educational development and patient safety, there is
growing concern regarding the mismatch in
healthcare professionals’ technological skills and
how technological innovators are informed of
healthcare needs (Carroll et al. 2018).
There is an opportunity to experiment with
algorithmic decision-making in simulated clinical
learning environments. For example, university-
“The Algorithm Will See You Now”: Exploring the Implications of Algorithmic Decision-making in Connected Health
763
simulated clinical skills laboratories provide a safe
innovation environment for healthcare solution
developers to experiment with implementing new
algorithms to improve healthcare practice. Thus, we
need to understand: How can we develop healthcare
education and training on algorithmics decision-
making for Connected Health technology solutions?
5.7 Regulatory Implications
Connected Health is a rapidly developing field never
before witnessed across the healthcare sector. It has
the potential to transform healthcare service systems
by increasing its safety, quality and overall efficiency
(Kvedar et al., 2014). However, as medical devices
and algorithms continuously rely more on software
development, one of the core challenges is examining
how Connected Health is regulated – often impacting
Connected Health innovation adoption and usage.
Many of these regulatory developments fall under
“medical devices”, giving rise to Software-as-a-
Medical Device (SaaMD) yet we need to re-examine
how regulation governs the development and usage of
algorithms which guide decision-making processes in
practice, for example, the role and impact of GDPR
as a requirement on the “right to explanation” in
Connected Health innovation. We posit the research
question: What are the key regulatory requirements
for algorithmic decision-making for software-as-a-
medical device within a Connected Health context?
6 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION
The future of Connected Health aims to apply data
sciences, machine learning, AI and IoT to tackle the
health problems and challenges faced by patients and
the care professionals. For example, tracking
personalized health indicators regularly such as blood
pressure and heart rate can help with the management
of the health and well-being of patients with heart
issues.
New technologies developed in the digital
industry, particularly in the emerging interfacing area
between big data and AI, are changing the way
healthcare delivery is decided upon and can have an
enormous economic impact on healthcare provision.
We are witnessing growing research efforts in
healthcare in the development of new smart sensing,
new algorithms, and new systems or devices for
personalised healthcare. One of the fundamentals of
these developments is to ensure that healthcare data
can be accessed and analysed effectively in order to
support accurate decision-making. This article
focuses on the algorithmic decision-making process
and the need to uncover key enabling and inhibiting
factors to support and deliver healthcare services. It
is becoming increasingly important for healthcare
technologies to invest in technology and to explore
how technology may be part of that solution.
We explain that central to Connected Health
innovation is the process of algorithmic decision-
making. Therefore, it is important that healthcare
stakeholders understand the need for improved
transparency and ethical considerations in Connected
Health algorithms. Therefore, as part of our future
research, we propose a research roadmap on key
topics. Scholars are encouraged to consider the seven
key research themes, namely: (i) ethical implications;
(ii) open science implications; (iii) accountability and
responsibility implications; (iv) ageing implications;
(v) data literacy implications; (vi) healthcare
professional skills gap; and (vii) regulatory
implications associated with algorithmic decision-
making in Connected Health.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported with the financial support
of the Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094
and co-funded under the European Regional
Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern
Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish
Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie).
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