Moral Decision-Making in Medical Hybrid Intelligent Systems: A Team Design Patterns Approach to the Bias Mitigation and Data Sharing Design Problems

Stijn, Jip van

Increasing automation in the healthcare sector calls for a Hybrid Intelligence (HI) approach to closely study and design the collaboration of humans and autonomous machines. Ensuring that medical HI systems' decision-making is ethical is key. The use of Team Design Patterns (TDPs) can advance this goal by describing successful and reusable configurations of design problems in which decisions have a moral component, as well as through facilitating communication in multidisciplinary teams designing HI systems. For this research, TDPs were developed to describe a set of solutions for two design problems in a medical HI system: (1) mitigating harmful biases in machine learning algorithms and (2) sharing health and behavioral patient data with healthcare professionals and system developers. The Socio-Cognitive Engineering methodology was employed, integrating operational demands, human factors knowledge, and a technological analysis into a set of TDPs. A survey was created to assess the usability of the patterns on their understandability, effectiveness, and generalizability. The results showed that TDPs are a useful method to unambiguously describe solutions for diverse HI design problems with a moral component on varying abstraction levels, that are usable by a heterogeneous group of multidisciplinary researchers. Additionally, results indicated that the SCE approach and the developed questionnaire are suitable methods for creating and assessing TDPs. The study concludes with a set of proposed improvements to TDPs, including their integration with Interaction Design Patterns, the inclusion of several additional concepts, and a number of methodological improvements. Finally, the thesis recommends directions for future research.