Explore our sister journals here.

Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research

Date Submitted: Sep 29, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 13, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 24, 2023

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

A Medical Ethics Framework for Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Fournier-Tombs E, McHardy J

A Medical Ethics Framework for Conversational Artificial Intelligence

J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e43068

DOI: 10.2196/43068

PMID: 37224277

PMCID: 10373921

A medical ethics framework for conversational AI

  • Eleonore Fournier-Tombs; 
  • Juliette McHardy

ABSTRACT

This paper is proposed a framework for considering the ethics of conversational chatbots used in medicine, notably during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework incorporates known risks of conversational chatbots, including errors, discrimination, stereotyping, exclusion, stigma, lack of privacy, poor data governance, and technological solutionism. The paper discusses how these can relate to principles of medical ethics, namely beneficience, non-maleficience, autonomy and justice. The objective of this paper is to inform future regulations in medical chatbot use.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Fournier-Tombs E, McHardy J

A Medical Ethics Framework for Conversational Artificial Intelligence

J Med Internet Res 2023;25:e43068

DOI: 10.2196/43068

PMID: 37224277

PMCID: 10373921

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.