Digital technology is everywhere for the benefit of our daily and professional life. It strongly impacts our life and was crucial to maintain professional and social activities during the COVID19 crisis. Similarly, digital technologies are key within biomedical engineering research topics. Innovations have been generated and introduced over the last 40 years, demonstrating how computing and digital technologies have impacted health care. Although the benefits of digital technology are obvious now, we are at the convergence of several issues which makes us aware about social, societal and environmental challenges associated with this technology. In the social domain, digital technologies raise concern about exclusion (financial, geographical, educational, demographical, racial, gender, language, and disabled related exclusion) and physical and mental health. In the societal dimension, digital technologies raise concern about politics and democracy (sovereignty and governance, cognitive filters and citizen's engagement), privacy and security (data acquisition and usage transparency, level of personal approval, and level of anonymization), and economics. In the environmental dimension, digital technologies raise concern about energy consumption and hardware production. This paper introduces and defines these challenges for digital technology in general, as well as when applied to health care. The objective of this paper is to make the research community more aware about the challenges of digital technology and to promote more transparency for innovative and responsible research.
翻译:数字技术对我们的日常生活和专业生活有着巨大的影响,在COVID19危机期间,对维持专业和社会活动至关重要。同样,数字技术是生物医学工程研究专题的关键。在过去40年中,创造和引进了创新,展示了计算机和数字技术如何影响保健。虽然数字技术的好处现在显而易见,但我们正在集中几个问题,使我们认识到与这一技术有关的社会、社会和环境挑战。在社会领域,数字技术引起人们对排斥(金融、地理、教育、人口、种族、性别、语言和残疾相关排斥)和身心健康的关切。在社会方面,数字技术引起对政治和民主(主权和治理、认知过滤和公民参与)、隐私和安全(数据获取和使用透明度、个人认可程度和匿名程度)的关切。在环境方面,数字技术引起人们对能源消费和硬件生产的关切。本文件介绍并界定了数字技术在一般领域以及保健方面面临的挑战。在社会方面,数字技术引起了关注(主权和治理、认知过滤和公民参与)、隐私和安全(数据获取和使用透明度、个人认可程度和匿名程度)以及经济学方面,目的是让社区更负责地了解并了解数字技术在研究方面面临的挑战。