Integrating ethics in digital mental healthcare technologies: a principle-based empirically grounded roadmap approach

Abstract

Digital mental healthcare technologies increasingly incorporate gamification, yet relevant ethical considerations remain underexamined. This paper introduces the Principle-Based Empirically Grounded Roadmap Approach (PERA), a methodological contribution to empirical bioethics. It has evolved from ethics research within the Horizon Europe project ASPbelong, which designs a collaboratively played augmented reality intervention for adolescents. PERA refines existing integrated empirical bioethics methodologies by responding to three key characteristics of the use case: a largely predetermined technology with a relatively low degree of openness in technological design, embedded co-development practices led by facilitators from within the project team, and planned future iterations beyond the ethics team's involvement. PERA integrates mapping of principles from the ethics literature, a scoping review of the moral intuitions of developers of comparable technologies, and the collection of original empirical data on the use case. Using abductive reasoning, these insights are synthesized into a tangible output: an ethics roadmap designed to guide and be adapted in future use case iterations. By advancing a methodology of combining normative reasoning with empirical insights on a concrete use case, this paper provides both practical tools for ethics researchers in technology projects and a means to generate empirically grounded conceptual contributions. Its outcomes, when brought into dialogue with findings from other integrated empirical bioethics research, can support the critical examination of broader assumptions and implications of gamified mental healthcare, including questions of good care and the broader social implications of such technologies.

Keywords: Applied ethics; Digital health; Empirical bioethics; Health apps; Methodology; Serious games; mHealth.

Fig. 1

Playtesting of the Lina augmented reality smartphone experience at a Czech school (photo copyright: Evgeniia Tokmakova)

Fig. 2

Work steps for creating the ethics roadmap