Title
Modeling Medical Ethics through Intelligent Agents
Abstract
The amount of research using health information has increased dramatically over the last past years. Indeed, a significative number of healthcare institutions have extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR), collected over several years for clinical and teaching purposes, but are uncertain as to the proper circumstances in which to use them to improve the delivery of care to the ones in need. Research Ethics Boards in Portugal and elsewhere in the world are grappling with these issues, but lack clear guidance regarding their role in the creation of and access to EHRs. However, we feel we have an effective way to handle Medical Ethics if we look to the problem under a structured and more rational way. Indeed, we felt that physicians were not aware of the relevance of the subject in their pre-clinical years, but their interest increase when they were exposed to patients. On the other hand, once EHRs are stored in machines, we also felt that we had to find a way to ensure that the behavior of machines toward human users, and perhaps other machines as well, is ethically acceptable. Therefore, in this article we discuss the importance of machine ethics and the need for machines that represent ethical principles explicitly. It is also shown how a machine may abstract an ethical principle from a logical representation of ethical judgments and use that principle to guide its own behavior.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-04280-5_10
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
Keywords
Field
DocType
Morality,intelligent agents,medical ethics
Research ethics,Health care,Nursing ethics,Intelligent agent,Machine ethics,Information ethics,Engineering ethics,Computer science,Medical ethics,Military medical ethics,Knowledge management
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
305
1868-4238
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.47
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
José Machado1123.27
Miguel F. M. Miranda291.75
António Abelha324357.30
José Neves458075.09
João Carvalho das Neves5416.48