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New safety monitoring technologies have begun to emerge in both research and practice. This may improve safety and health at the workplace, but may also cause worries about the implications for people exposed to the technologies. This calls for ethical considerations concerning the monitoring technologies. A need, which is not currently fulfilled. The lack of ethical considerations means that potential negative consequences of the technologies are never brought into the light of day, which means that potentially problematic technologies are developed and implemented at workplaces at the cost of worker health and safety. In order to address this issue, we revisit existing literature on monitoring technologies at work and develop the Duty, Utility, Virtue (DUV) framework for considering ethical implications of OSH technologies. We then examine nine safety monitoring studies, in order to illustrate the use of the DUV framework and show the character of ethical considerations currently taking place in this field of research. The analysis of the nine safety monitoring studies shows that all studies had severe shortcomings in their ethical considerations and that the development and implementation of safety monitoring technologies inadvertently risk affecting both workers overview of work, their influence, their skill discretion, their safety and their physical and mental wellbeing in negative ways. All, in the name of safety. To remedy this, we suggest employing the DUV framework may be a way for researchers and organizations to reflect on the technologies they develop, implement and study. This may help research communities and organizations/managers provide ethically well-grounded recommendations for technology implementation to the audiences and people they engage with.
Ajslev et al. (Fri,) studied this question.