Wearable Sensors and Digital Platforms in Health: empowering citizens through trusted and trustworthy ICT technology

Personal wearable sensors have the potential to become the most powerful individuall self-surveillance technology available to citizens. These ubiquitous, networked devices currently offer a breadth of capabilities to sense, digitally enhance and upload data of fine granularity such as body and health measurements, images, location, sound and motion. However, for wider adoption, it is crucial for citizens/end-users to rely on trusted and trustworthy implementations of wearable sensing technologies. Trusted systems are defined as systems functioning normally and delivering what it is promised and what the user expects, whereas trustworthiness is mostly objectively defined according to specific criteria and can be considered a metric for how much a system deserves the trust of its users. Therefore, in order to establish criteria for trust and trustworthiness, the present report aims to screen and analyse emerging solutions and architectures for verifying that functionalities, motivations and values embedded in their design hold the potential for user empowerment, equitable use and meaningful community participation in digital health platforms. As a whole, the report provides a characterization of emerging wearable sensors and digital platforms for health activities according to identified criteria for trust and trustworthiness. These criteria specifically encompass certain normative features, embedded in the systems and aimed at providing citizens/users with powers of control and choice over the devices. Beside increasing citizens/users’ trust, these normative measures—specifically by-design and in design forms of rights protection) also allow to improve agency, namely citizens/users’ ability to autonomously control the system. The report offers a detailed analysis of some wearable sensors and platforms and provide some recommendations to improve their degree of trust and trustworthiness. participation in digital health platforms