Ethics in Digital Health: A Deontic Accountability Framework

We present key ethics concerns in digital health and introduce related ethics principles to address these concerns. We propose mappings of these principles into deontic logic concepts to support ethics-based analysis. This provides input into detailed design of deontic and accountability constraints using semantic foundation from the ODP enterprise language standard 1. We refer to our approach as 'ethics by design' because it aims at explicit inclusion of ethics principles into contemporary software development and tooling. The paper is focused on digital health, but the approach has broader applicability.