(Nature) – Wearable technology is a boon for studying health behaviours, but it comes with some thorny ethical concerns, says researcher Wuyoh Sui.

Wuyoh Sui, a digital-health and behavioural-change researcher at Western University in London, Canada, has been studying how best to use digital technologies to improve peoples’ physical-activity levels and mental well-being. He has also been researching the accuracy, safety and effectiveness of these artificial-intelligence tools used to improve health behaviours, which often rely on ‘black box’ algorithms that make it hard to understand how inputs and outputs are created and handled.

Although wearables will undoubtedly provide more-tailored health interventions by using personalized data, Sui says there are many ethical concerns to navigate when using such commercial devices in research. The biggest two are data privacy (what data are used by the AI-based algorithms in these devices) and data security (who can potentially access those data). (Read More)