Ethical Considerations of Digital Phenotyping from the Perspective of a Healthcare Practitioner

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce digital phenotyping and its applications to healthcare. Despite the promise of this new form of clinical diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry, use of digital phenotyping raises several ethical concerns. We use insights derived from a clinical case study to frame these different ethical questions. We discuss how current healthcare practice and privacy policies address these questions and impose requirements for non-healthcare scientists and practitioners using digital phenotyping. We emphasize that this chapter frames the discussion from the perspective of the healthcare practitioner. We conclude by briefly reviewing more strongly theoretically based discussions of this emerging topic.