Common Challenges in Ethical Practice when Testing Technology with Human Participants: Analyzing the Experiences of a Local Ethics Committee

Abstract

Ethical aspects are of key importance in research and the development of technical systems. They play a major role when the societal impact of innovative products and new technologies is considered. However, ethics are already essential during technology development, especially when testing these technologies with human participants. The latter is becoming increasingly important when applying for project funding and for publishing peer reviewed journal papers. Responding to these needs, a local ethics committee at the Department of Psychology and Ergonomics at Technische Universität Berlin was founded in 2009. In this paper, we present an analysis of common pitfalls and blind spots that were detected by reviewers of this ethics committee. We studied the reviews of 98 applications for ethical approval. Results show that researchers (a) often lack concrete knowledge about potential ethical issues of their research and (b) that they might benefit from convenient tools to address relevant ethical challenges at early stages of product design. Based on the results of our analysis, we propose a set of six simple rules that can help to detect and to overcome most of the frequently appearing ethical issues.