Last week, the World Health Organization released a policy brief aimed at combating age-related prejudices in health-related artificial intelligence tools.
A brief “Ageism in Artificial Intelligence for Health” proposes a wide range of measures to ensure that older people are effectively engaged in the processes, techniques and services that affect them.
Alana Officer, Head of Unit for Demographic Changes and Healthy Aging at WHO, said:
“To ensure that AI technology plays a beneficial role, we need to identify age discrimination and eliminate it from its design, development, use and evaluation,” continued the officer.
Important reason
As WHO briefly states, AI has great potential to transform healthcare, including at the level of the entire population.
Especially for the elderly, tools for developing aging-related drugs that enable long-term care with the community through remote patient monitoring may be particularly useful.
At the same time, AI technology can recreate social bias and exacerbate existing disparities in care.
In this brief explanation, WHO focused on prejudices affecting older people, but acknowledged that other ethical issues such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status also need to be addressed. rice field.
“Stereotypes, prejudices, coding of discrimination in AI technology, or their signs in their use, for example, impair the quality of care for the elderly, reduce intergenerational involvement, or because of prejudice in the elderly’s AI. It can limit the beneficial use of technology. There are often false assumptions about how older people live and interact with technology in their daily lives. ” Researchers write in the overview.
For example, older people may be excluded from the datasets used to train AI tools, or from market research, design, and testing.
The brief description includes an overview of several strategies for maximizing the benefits of health AI for the elderly.
- Participatory design of AI technology by and with seniors
- Data science teams of different ages
- Data collection including age
- Investing in digital infrastructure and digital literacy for the elderly and their healthcare providers and caregivers
- Establishing the rights of older people to agree and disagree with AI’s health recommendations
- Governance frameworks and regulations to empower and cooperate with older people
- Increasing research to understand new uses of AI and how to avoid bias
- Robust ethical process in AI development and application
“AI technology can enhance elderly health and social care by identifying risks and enabling older people to meet their needs individually or in collaboration with healthcare providers. You can, “read the policy brief.
“To ensure that AI technology plays a beneficial role, we need to identify age discrimination and eliminate it from their design, development, use and evaluation,” he continued.
Big trend
A new focus has been placed on dealing with AI bias, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chris Hemphill, Vice President of Applied AI and Growth at Symphony RM, said: Healthcare IT News Last year, addressing this issue required a comprehensive approach.
“There’s a machine learning part, but there’s also a human part,” they said. “Modeling is meaningless without user experience, user discussion, and training on how and why users use it.”
On record
“AI has great expectations for public health and medical practice,” the researchers wrote in an overview of WHO.
“Nevertheless, to fully enjoy the benefits of AI, we need to address the ethical challenges of health systems, practitioners and beneficiaries of health and public health services,” they continued.
Kat Jercich is a Senior Editor of Healthcare IT News.
twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
