Guest Lecture: Dr. Wanda Spahl

We're delighted to invite you to the guest lecture of Dr. Wanda Spahl from the Karl Landsteiner University in Austria. She will give us insights in her exiting research on gamified healthcare technologies and ethics.

Dr Wanda Spahl (Krems/AUT):
“An ethical framework for digital mental health serious games for young people”
Institute for Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, Seminarraum EG
Winterthurerstrasse 30, 8006 Zurich
Tuesday Nov 26, 2.15-3.15pm.
 
Abstract:

Digital mental health serious games have been increasingly used as therapeutic tool. They are especially valuable in the context of young adults, due to the popularity of digital games, their engaging narratives, and the safe space they provide for exploring new behaviours. However, ethical considerations related to these tools remain under-researched. This paper answers to this lack of ethics guidance, which is particularly important when developing gamified healthcare technologies for the sensitive and vulnerable phase of adolescence.

This paper proposes an ethical framework, which maps the breadth of ethical considerations pertinent when developing such novel therapeutic tools in a structured and accessible manner. Methodologically, our principle-based empirically grounded approach combines conceptual insights from the existing ethics literature, a scoping review on ethical considerations discussed in publications on previous interventions and empirical insights from our work as embedded ethicists in the HORIZON-2020 project ASP-belong. Based on evidence-based psychology, Augmented Social Play (ASP) aims at fostering a sense of belonging among adolescents through the use of a serious game with augmented reality (AR) elements.

Our framework identifies relevant ethical principles, practical examples, mitigation strategies, and reflection questions across three intertwined areas:

(i) Developers: The focus is on including diverse forms of experiences and expertise in the development process. Developers may include a wide range people, such as game designers and researchers from various disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, and user experience research (principles: recognition and equity). Additional input can come from consulting, collaborating with and co-creating with co-developers, such as young users and education experts (principles: privacy, safety, autonomy, appreciation and transparency).

(ii) The game: The focus is on ethical considerations related to in-built design decisions, such as how the aesthetics and in-game choices are designed, and how users’ input is used for creating a personalised experience (principles: accessibility, privacy, empowerment, autonomy, social connections, cultural sensitivity, social sensitivity).

(iii) Young users: The focus is on the game’s impact on young users’ health. This includes the health and rights of immediate users when they play the game (principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence). It also highlights societal responsibility. Mental health games should ideally address gaps in mental healthcare and be distributed fairly to ensure equitable access and benefits (principle: justice).

This paper aims to achieve two goals: (a) It provides practical guidance for (co-)developing digital mental health serious games for young people. We argue that each project should assess the relevance of these ethical issues and reflect on their significance within that specific project. (b) Second, this paper offers a conceptual map of ethical considerations for developing the technology in focus. By design, the framework remains open to incorporating additional considerations as they emerge from further specific projects.

 
Dr. Wanda Spahl is a social scientist with expertise in qualitative research and ethics. She researches health and healthcare in the context of marginalized groups, with a focus on digital technologies. Since 2023, she has been part of the EU Horizon project ASP-belong, which is developing a collaborative augmented reality intervention to promote adolescent health. Her doctoral thesis, From Medical Care to Citizenship, addressed healthcare for refugees in Vienna (2024, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna). She has published in journals such as Bioethics, Critical Public Health, Comparative Migration Studies, and Frontiers in Public Health. In 2022, she founded PARABOL, an association for artistic research.