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Ethics4EU
Education Brick
Smart Pills
Teacher Support Site
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I. Introduction
This brick is concerned with "Intelligent pills" (also known as "smart pills" or "robot pills" or "electronic pills)"). These are a combination of a drug and a device, which can be described as "an oral tablet that incorporates some type of medical device, such as a microchip, that, for example, controls the release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient after ingestion"
(Avery and Liu, 2011).
II. Classification
The ethical issues are security, safety, and data privacy.
The computing domain is Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed systems.
The interdisciplinarity is with electronics, journalism and biology.
The application domain is health.
III. Teaching Method(s)
1 Debate and Discussion
In this particular implementation of the brick we plan to incorporate a debate/discussion
concerning the smart pills media articles that we are analysing.
1.1 Academic Load
The planned load is 9 hours direct contact time
with the students, and 9 hours of 'homework' for students to prepare in their own time.
1.2 Pre-requisites
The pre-requisites are foundational knowledge of software engineering and networked/distributed system architectures.
This implementation of the educational brick is aimed at 3rd/4th year engineering students who have chosen to specialise in information system management and development. As such, they participate in a module concerned with the architecture of complex systems, and apply their learning to developing a prototype system with a real industrial client, as part of a significant team project. In recent years, many of the team projects have incorporated technologies from the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Furthermore, the system requirements have become more and more demanding with respect to data protection and privacy (related to the GDPR in Europe). Finally, the students are becoming increasingly aware of the problem of such systems malfunctioning and the impact on the users when they fail because of internal
bugs or because of unexpected attacks from the exterior.
1.3 Learning Objectives (Ethical, Computing and Transverse)
The computing learning objectives are: how to read documentation of IOT devices and evaluate whether there is coherency between natural language descriptions, formal technical specifications and the hardware.
The ethical learning objectives are: consider who is responsible for the privacy of the device-generated data; the implications of the device being faulty/buggy; and how to protect the device
against attacks.
The transverse learning objectives are: communication skills and interaction with the media.
1.4 Teaching and Evaluation Approach(es)
The delivery mechanism/teaching approach is based upon students being involved in a debate with a journalist concerning whether the technical and ethical issues have been well-addressed in the general media. This will involve role-playing, following the advice from
Diana Adela Martin et al. (2019) .
The evaluation is indirect - the students are evaluated through their project work, and one of
the criteria is whether they have adequately considered the ethical issues.
- Step 1 - introductory reading (3 hours outside class) - the students are introduced to published research on general digital ethics
(Stahl, B.C., Timmermans J., and Mittelstadt, B.D., 2016),
ethics in IOT (AboBakr, A. and Azer, M., 2017),
ethics in IOT health (Cerf, V., 2020) and,
finally, smart pills (Avery, M. and Liu, D., 2011) ).
- Step 2.1 - class discussion (1.5 hours - small class room) - facts v opinions, legal v moral v ethical.
The students are asked to use what they have learned from reading and discussing the published articles to analyse a report in the general media: Gut feeling: the swallowable gut sensor that could replace a colonoscopy. By Buffy Gorrilla, January 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald.(Web archive).
- Step 2.2 - search for new material (1.5 hours - small class room) - how to search/filter/categorise
- Step 3 - analysis (and comparison) of device specifications, manufacturer claims, media commentary (3 hours outside class) - provide the material only if the students fail to find it themselves
- Step 4.1 - class discussion (1 hour - small class room) - identify the different roles in the provided case study and their ethical responsibilities
- Step 4.2 - preparation for media panel role-playing (2 hours - small class room) - students decide on the
structure and composition of panel debate
- Step 5 - preparation for media panel role-playing (3 hours outside class)
- Step 6.1 - media panel debate (1 hour - multi-media laboratory with video-conference and recording facilities) -
with the assitance of a journalist who is specialist in digital ethics and/or smart-pills, there will
be a panel discussion where students play various role (as identified earlier) and answer various questions (as identified during the preparation). The audio will be recorded for further analysis.
- Step 6.2 - panel debate review, evaluation and concluding discussion (2 hours - small class room) - Did the
brick meet the learning objectives (technical and ethical)? The evaluation at this step is purely formative.
1.5 Additional Support Material (For Teachers and Students)
- IOT device specifications - TO BE PROVIDED
- Teaching Guidelines
IV. Secondary Material
Peer Reviewed Papers
Ethical issues (general)
Ethical issues (privacy)
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What must we hide: The ethics of privacy and the ethos of disclosure.
Anita L Allen, St. Thomas Law Review, 25(1):1, 2012.
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Privacy by design: The 7 foundational principles.
Ann Cavoukian et al., Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada, 5, 2009.
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Privacy issues and data protection in big data: A case study analysis under GDPR.
Nils Gruschka, Vasileios Mavroeidis, Kamer Vishi, and Meiko Jensen. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pages 5027 - 5033. IEEE, 2018.
Ethical issues (safety and security)
Computing issues (IOT)
Problem Domain (Health)
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Bringing smart pills to market: FDA regulation of ingestible drug/device combination products. Avery, M. and Liu, D. (2011), Food and Drug Law Journal, 66(3), pp.329-352.
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On the internet of medical things. Vinton G. Cerf. Commun. ACM, 63(8):5, July 2020.
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Ethics of the health-related internet of things: a narrative review. Brent Mittelstadt. Ethics and Information Technology9(3):157 - 175, 2017.
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Ethics in public health research - privacy and public health at risk: public health
confidentiality in the digital age. Julie Myers, Thomas R Frieden, Kamal M Bherwani, and Kelly J Henning. American Journal of public health, 98(5):793 - 801, 2008.
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Cleartext data transmissions in consumer IOT medical devices.
Daniel Wood, Noah Apthorpe, and Nick Feamster. In Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Internet of Things Security and Privacy, pages 7 - 12, 2017.
Books
Reports
Social media
Popular Press
- Gut feeling: the swallowable gut sensor that could replace a colonoscopy. By Buffy Gorrilla, January 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald.(Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security, Health, smart-Pills
- FDA approves pill with sensor that digitally tracks if patients have ingested their medication . By Sandy Wash, US-FDA Press release, November 2017. (Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security, Health, smart-Pills
- The Potential and Perils of the IoT in Healthcare. . By Mark Stone, Security Intelligence, November 21, 2019. (Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security, Health
- Major Cyberattacks On Healthcare Grew 63% in 2016.. By Kelly Sheridan, Darkreading, December 2016.(Web archive).
KEYWORDs: Security, Health
- Hacked IV Pumps and Digital Smart Pens Can Lead to Data Breaches. By Dawn Kawamoto, DarkReading, April, 2017. (Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Privacy, Health, Security
- St. Jude admits security vulnerabilities in cardiac devices. By Jessica Davis, January 2017, Healthcare news. (Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security, Health
- Bluetooth-Related Flaws Threaten Dozens of Medical Devices . By Lily Hay Newman, Wired, 20 Feb, 2020.(Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security, Health
- Smart locks opened with nothing more than a MAC address.. By Charlie Osborne, ZDNet, August 2020 . (Web archive).
KEYWORDs: IOT, Security
Blog Posts
Multi-media
V. Links to Other Related Bricks
As yet, there are no links to other related bricks.