Passive monitoring by smart toilets for precision health.

Smart toilets are a key tool for enabling precision health monitoring in the home, but such passive monitoring has ethical considerations.

Ethics and informatics in the age of COVID-19: challenges and recommendations for public health organization and public policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States has exposed significant gaps in information systems and processes that prevent timely clinical and public health decision-making. Specifically, the use of informatics to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, support COVID-19 care delivery, and accelerate knowledge discovery bring to the forefront issues of privacy, surveillance, limits of state powers, and interoperability between public health and clinical information systems. Using a consensus-building process, we critically analyze informatics-related ethical issues in light of the pandemic across 3 themes: (1) public health reporting and data sharing, (2) contact tracing and tracking, and (3) clinical scoring tools for critical care.

Pros and cons of prosent as an alternative to traditional consent in medical research.

In their recent article, Porsdam Mann propose to share biomedical research data more widely, securely and efficiently using blockchain technologies.1 They present compelling arguments for how the blockchain presents both a technological innovation, and a deontologically grounded policy innovation to traditional research consent. Their proposal can be read in conversation with a rich body of evidence to suggest current consent processes are problematic on at least one of tripartite bases in biomedical research: that it be fully informed.