Ethical challenges and dilemmas on the use of chatbots in healthcare

13 July

New lecture in the cycle organized with Barcelona Friends of UNESCO to discuss bioethical issues. On Wednesday 13 July, Antoni Baena, lecturer and director of the University Master's Degree in Digital Health at the Open University of Catalonia, explained the main applications of chatbots in health, and the ethical conflicts that may arise from their use.

Even if you may not have realized it, you will almost certainly have interacted with a chatbot, a virtual assistant that collects and provides information. They may seem new but in fact they've been around for a while. The pandemic has seen an exponential growth in the use of artificial intelligence, but there has not been sufficient time to analyse and resolve the ethical dilemmas which can be associated with the generalized use of a technology that has the capacity to do something that previously was the exclusive domain of humans: the capacity to take decisions.

Chatbots increase the efficiency of health interventions, reducing costs and providing personalized care. However, the most important factor limiting their use is not the quality of the data they handle, collect, process or share, but rather the question of whether a robust, transparent ethical model is applied. In this lecture, we will analyse the possibilities for the use of this technology, the ethical dilemmas that its large-scale deployment may generate, and the potential solutions.