Ethics should be a key consideration for the responsible and save advancement of healthcare through technology. The Convergence ethics team collaborates with Convergence Health & Technology researchers, providing an ethical lens through which latent issues are made explicit, thereby contributing to more responsible technological solutions.

Timely consideration of ethical issues through deliberation is crucial for the responsible innovation of health technology. This can relate to questions of responsible research practices, for example on how sensitive health data should be dealt with. But it can also proactively contribute to ensuring the effective and acceptable innovation of medical technologies and their uptake by society.

Until recently, the fields of biomedical ethics and ethics of technology have been developed in separation, with the former being long-established and the latter quickly catching up. Medical-technical innovation, being rather undiscovered territory, requires a synergy of these ethical subdisciplines. This means integrating existing approaches from both fields of ethics, but also developing new approaches that are geared towards the unique features of specific medical technologies. Fast-track innovation of medical technologies comes with additional challenges as it leaves less time for critical reflection while a rapid solution to urgent societal problems can be an ethical concern itself.

The convergence ethics team, consisting of three PIs and two postdocs, explores, develops, disseminates, and applies ethical tools and frameworks that can serve as a boundary condition for the success of Convergence Health & Technology. Including ethics right from the start contributes to ethically responsible and socially acceptable innovations