28 January 2020

Ensuring the benefits of AI for All: Designing a Sustainable Platform for Public and Professional Stakeholder Engagement

Associated people

Director of the Centre for Law, Health and Emerging Technologies at Oxford: HeLEX

The Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) is venturing on a new ESRC-JST funded project to advise on the best practice of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare to ensure the benefits for all in the UK and Japan.

Professor Jane Kaye, Director of HeLEX in collaboration with Professor Beverley Yamamoto of Osaka University in Japan will embark on this 3-year project from January 2020. The inter-disciplinary team includes researchers from social science, medicine, life science, and ethical and legal backgrounds.

The programme of research will adopt a mixed-methods approach and aims to investigate effective strategies to support a platform for stakeholder engagement and involvement in the development and implementation of AI technologies in healthcare settings. We will identify and address challenges faced by the proliferation of these data driven technologies in healthcare and how they may affect patients, the public, healthcare professionals, and involved stakeholders. Alongside the empirical research, the project will recruit a patient and public involvement panel to contribute to the project activities over the three year period.

The research will focus on:

What are the current and anticipated uses of AI technologies in treatment, diagnostic decision-making and precision medicine;
Understanding the issues that stakeholders perceive will influence the adoption and implementation of AI in healthcare;
Identifying the types of engagement mechanisms, safeguards and regulatory controls they would like to see in place; and
How to development a platform for engagement that can address issues of trust, responsibility, accountability and transparency, and influence normative practices in the implementation of AI technologies in healthcare.

Beverley Yamamoto says:

It is exciting be working with the Oxford team on this very meaningful project. Given that we are only just starting to apply AI to health care settings, identifying appropriate engagement mechanisms to allow key stakeholders, including patients, to work together to ensure the relevance, acceptance and equitability of this new technology is of profound importance.

This project is one of six which have been funded through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Fund for International Collaboration (FIC) in a joint UK-Japan initiative. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), both part of UKRI, contributed £2.4m via FIC, while the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) contributed ¥180m.