Ethical Concerns and Perceptions of Consumer Neurotechnology from Lived Experiences of Mental Workload Tracking

Midha, Serena; Wilson, Max L.; Sharples, Sarah

Abstract

With rapid growth in the development of consumer neurotechnology, it is imperative to consider the ethical implications that this might have in order to minimise consumer harm. Whilst ethical and legal guidelines for commercialisation have previously been suggested, we aimed to further this discussion by investigating the ethical concerns held by potential end users of consumer neurotechnology. 19 participants who had previously experienced mental workload tracking in their daily lives were interviewed about their ethical concerns and perceptions of this type of future neurotechnology. An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach identified three superordinate themes. These related to concerns surrounding privacy, data validity and misinterpretation, and personal identity. The findings provide further validation for previous research and highlight further ethical considerations that should be factored into the commercialisation of neurotechnology.

Citation

Midha, S., Wilson, M. L., & Sharples, S. (2022). Ethical Concerns and Perceptions of Consumer Neurotechnology from Lived Experiences of Mental Workload Tracking. In FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (564-573). https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533119

• Conference Name: FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• Conference Location: Seoul Republic of Korea
• Start Date: Jun 21, 2022
• End Date: Jun 24, 2022
• Acceptance Date: Apr 7, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Jun 20, 2022
• Publication Date: Jun 20, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 3, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 20, 2022
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 564-573
• Book Title: FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• ISBN: 9781450393522
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533119
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/7950490
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3531146.3533119
• Related Public URLs: https://facctconference.org/2022/