Ethically Informed Software Process for Smart Health Home

Smart health homes (SHHs) integrate wearable sensors and various interconnected devices using the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. SHHs combine IoT, data communication, and health-related applications to deliver healthcare services at home. The existing regulations and standards for SHH design are insufficient for home health care. Technical and device standards are available for guiding SHH design and implementation, but ethical standards are lacking. We identified six ethical requirements important for SHH: safety/trust, privacy/data security, vulnerable groups, individual autonomy, transparency/explainability/fairness, and social responsibility/ morality. We identified a set of questions useful for software engineering (SE) process for ethically informed software in SHH design and mapped them to the steps of software process. We mapped related guidelines from relevant professional codes of conduct. These questions can guide ethically informed software process of SHH.