Ethox Centre, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Julius Center, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Med Ethics. 2018 Oct;44(10):685-689. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2017-104741. Epub 2018 Jun 15.
Mobile health (mHealth) is rapidly being implemented and changing our ways of doing, understanding and organising healthcare. mHealth includes wearable devices as well as apps that track fitness, offer wellness programmes or provide tools to manage chronic conditions. According to industry and policy makers, these systems offer efficient and cost-effective solutions for disease prevention and self-management. While this development raises many ethically relevant questions, so far mHealth has received only little attention in medical ethics. This paper provides an overview of bioethical issues raised by mHealth and aims to draw scholarly attention to the ethical significance of its promises and challenges. We show that the overly positive promises of mHealth need to be nuanced and their desirability critically assessed. Finally, we offer suggestions to bioethicists to engage with this emerging trend in healthcare to develop mHealth to its best potential in a morally sound way.
移动医疗（mHealth）正在迅速普及并改变着我们的医疗服务方式、认知和组织方式。mHealth 包含可穿戴设备以及应用程序，这些设备可以跟踪健身情况、提供健康计划或提供管理慢性病的工具。据行业和政策制定者称，这些系统为疾病预防和自我管理提供了高效、具有成本效益的解决方案。尽管这一发展引发了许多具有伦理相关性的问题，但到目前为止，移动医疗在医学伦理方面的关注度还很低。本文概述了移动医疗引发的生物伦理问题，并旨在引起学者对其承诺和挑战的伦理意义的关注。我们表明，移动医疗过于积极的承诺需要加以细致区分，并对其可取性进行批判性评估。最后，我们为生物伦理学家提供了一些建议，希望他们能够参与到这一医疗保健领域的新兴趋势中，以一种合理的道德方式发展移动医疗，使其发挥最大潜力。
