Celia Fisher

Bio:
Dr. Celia Fisher is interested in the ethical challenges of digital technologies to psychological research and practice and their application to public health resources.

Abstract:
The integration of wearable technologies into health and mental health research introduces ethical challenges that federal and international guidelines are ill-equipped to address. This presentation will critically examine whether the Belmont core principles, respect for persons, beneficence and justice, can be adequately applied to studies utilizing emotion recognition systems and other wearable applications in health research. The presentation will be organized around ethical risks across four domains: participant experience, privacy, data management, and access/usability. Harms include information hazards (e.g., private data leaks), misinformation harms (e.g., erosion of trust), and tensions between corporate and research agendas (e.g., the opaque role of third-party companies in participant data management). Special attention is given to how these technologies impact power relations, identity formation, and surveillance—particularly among youth and vulnerable adult populations where wearables may normalize self-quantification and exacerbate feelings of exclusion. Conceptualization of ethical oversight of wearable tech must evolve to meet the realities of digital-era research.