RESUMO
The digital revolution is perceived as minimizing the environmental impact of human activities. However, digital actually uses real physical equipment, that consumes natural resources and emits greenhouse gases. The French Ministry of health has very soon engaged in the development of an ethical digital health with a strong concern for eco-responsibility. We have developed an Ecoscore service to allow providers of web and mobile health apps to calculate the environmental impact of their apps. The ecoscore is computed on a script describing the canonical use of the app. It is based on parameters actually measured, data flow (data downloaded from datacenters), performance (time taken to display the result of an action), and energy consumption (battery discharge rate). The French Ministry of Health has made the ecoscore mandatory to software providers candidating to the service catalog of Mon espace santé, a digital health space offered to all French citizens.
Assuntos
Aplicativos Móveis , Telemedicina , Humanos , 60713 , Meio AmbienteRESUMO
Although guaranteed by the GDPR, transparency of health data processing may not be fully respected, leading citizens to mistrust eHealth and discard digital health services. Identifying and safeguarding ethics in eHealth services is thus important to promote their development. We conducted a survey to assess the extent of ethical issues induced by the use of digital health services, understand the efforts citizens would be willing to accept for reporting such issues, and evaluate citizens' expectations regarding this reporting. Among 200 respondents, 36% reported having encountered ethical issues with the processing of their health data or with digital health services being poorly inclusive. Faced to ethical issues when using a digital health service, 49% of respondents were rather or very angry, and 33% felt rather or very dependent. Most respondents were ready to report digital health ethical issues if there is a feedback for each report.
