Ethics and Artificial Intelligence in the Interdisciplinary Collaborations of Smart Care

This article explores how the work of ethical assurance is understood by those involved in artificial intelligence development and deployment, and uses the findings to consider how ethical reflection might be better supported. The article presents a case study of a multi-disciplinary project developing a care support system that used machine learning in remote monitoring of people living at home with dementia. In this project engineering and clinical perspectives come together through a fractionated interdisciplinary trading zone to address goals such as remote detection of urinary infections. Ethics is done, according to project participants, in formal ethical review processes and through a shared understanding of common goals, but also in discipline-specific practices that sit outside of the trading zone. A key role is played by team members who translate concerns between discipline-based research groups and who act as proxies for the ultimate users of the systems not directly present within the trading zone. These insights into cross-disciplinary ethical work in relation to smart care lead us to recommend that infrastructural support for imaginative and transparent ethical reflection needs to be woven through the collaborations that create artificial intelligence, both across disciplines and throughout the lifetime of a project.