IMDEA Materials contributes to ethics-guided research for Healthcare 5.0

A set of emergent technologies radically transforming health management has led to the novel paradigm of Healthcare 5.0, which heralds healthier societies.

However, to avoid an unwanted advent of a healthcare dystopia, and to effectively and equitably deploy the extremely varied Biomedical Engineering 5.0 technologies that enable Healthcare 5.0, ethical excellence is required along their research, development and societal transfer.

In this context, IMDEA Materials Institute in collaboration with Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Aalborg University have performed a systematic analysis of materials and technologies from the Healthcare 5.0 realm, through the prism of the more fundamental ethical principles and derived virtues of the common morality theory, including: beneficence, nonmaleficence, respect for autonomy, and justice or equity.

The purpose and content of the study are schematically summarised in Figure 1 below, which puts forward Prof. Andrés Díaz Lantada’s vision of advanced materials for healthcare as key enabling resources for developing technologies for Healthcare 5.0. Ethical guidance along their research, development and deployment clearly aligns with increased societal impacts and sustainability.

Figure 1. Advanced materials for healthcare as key enabling resources for developing transformative technologies for Healthcare 5.0. Ethics-guided R&D helps to sustainably bridge the gap between novel materials and societal impacts. AI generated with the support of MS Copilot based on the content of the study and detailed indications by the corresponding author.

For Prof. Díaz Lantada, principal investigator of “Bioinspired, Smart and Living Materials” at IMDEA Materials Institute, “ethics-guided development of materials and technologies for healthcare becomes more fundamental than ever before, considering the extremely rapid pace of scientific-technological discoveries and the challenges linked to the incorporation of artificial intelligence to the technological portfolio”.

Besides, “the study has been developed in collaboration with Prof. Mette Ebbesen, from Aalborg University, expert in techno-anthropology and in the ethics of nano-/bio-materials and synthetic biology, whose guidance for understanding and applying the principles of biomedical ethics of Beauchamp and Childress has been fundamental”.

The study constitutes an addition to an already fruitful series of ethical analyses performed in collaboration between Profs. Ebbesen and Díaz Lantada including “the ethics of engineered living materials” and “artificial intelligence aided ethics in frontier research”.

Studies linked to the ethics of tissue engineering and biofabrication are under development, as part of IMDEA Materials compromise with ethical research, development and deployment of materials and derived technological solutions.

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