Thammasat University students interested in the allied health sciences, education, artificial intelligence, ethics, sociology, computer science, technology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 25 August Zoom webinar conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) In Private Spaces: Tracking and Tracing Kids.

The event, on Thursday, 25 August 2022 at 11am Bangkok time, is presented by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The TU Library collection includes some books about how artificial intelligence relates to children.

Students are invited to register at this link:

As the webinar description posted online explains:

This project has investigated the use of devices to track the location of children outside of the home. The research aims to understand how families with children use location-providing apps and devices as part of their wider day-to-day household logistics, communication, childcare, and safety.

Speakers will include Dr. Simon Coghlan, a moral philosopher and veterinarian who is senior lecturer at CAIDE and the School of Computing and Information Systems (CIS), the University of Melbourne.

Also speaking will be Dr. Bjorn Nansen a digital media researcher; Dr. Jane Mavoa, a postdoctoral researcher in media studies; and Dr. Martin Gibbs is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne.

The University of Melbourne research project, Tracking kids: Use and repurposing of wearable and mobile devices was launched with the following goals:

Mobile devices such as smartphones, and dedicated tracking devices are increasingly used by families to track the location of children outside of the home. Research on these geo-locative technologies has so far looked at parent motivations for using them, the nature of and utility of resulting data, and privacy and datafication issues with tracking technologies in general.

However, there is very little detailed knowledge about how families with children use location-providing apps and devices as part of their wider day-to-day household logistics, communication, childcare, and safety.

Tracking Kids

This seed funded project will provide insights into:

How mobile and wearable devices and apps are not only used for location tracking, but also how they connect to routines and practices of child activity, health, and behaviour tracking

How the advertising and marketing of child tracking apps and devices reflects norms and anxieties of good parenting

How services such as “Find my iPhone”, Snapchat, and smart doorbells (e.g. Ring), are repurposed within day-to-day household management and surveillance practices

How these tracking practices are ‘flipped’ and used by children for tracking parents (e.g. for knowing how far away from home a parent is)

And, finally, what ethical questions arise from these pervasive, distributed, and dynamic forms of digitally tracking kids.

This project will provide an initial mapping of these various dynamics and issues. It will thereby produce more detailed knowledge of emerging forms of child tracking through the use of pervasive, location tracking software and devices in the context of household logistics, childcare, and communication.

In recent years, research has shown that for children, wearing digital devices can be useful for health and physical fitness purposes. One example evaluated the Five-year pediatric use of a digital wearable fitness device: lessons from a pilot case study:

Wearable fitness devices are increasingly being used by the general population, with many new applications being proposed for healthy adults as well as for adults with chronic diseases. Fewer, if any, studies of these devices have been conducted in healthy adolescents and teenagers, especially over a long period of time. The goal of this work was to document the successes and challenges involved in 5 years of a wearable fitness device use in a pediatric case study…

Conclusion

With periodic adjustments for growth, this pilot study shows these devices can be used for more accurate and consistent measurements in adolescents and teenagers over longer periods of time, to potentially promote healthy behaviors.

An article in The Economist earlier this year observed:

There has long been a gap between the parts of Western societies and economies that look after people when they are sick and the parts that help them stay healthy. Wearable devices—and the technologies that they enable—are starting to bridge that divide in two ways. On the one hand, they are making life more medicalised, with people, for the first time, keeping an eye on things like their nocturnal heart rate. On the other hand, they are ushering in a shift in the balance of responsibility between medical treatment provided by clinicians and what patients do to improve their health.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the process. Wearables entered the lives of more people and took on new roles. With gyms closed, exercise shifted outdoors and many people bought them for the first time, to keep track of how much they walked, ran and pedalled. A parallel trend was that lots of consumers began to see these devices as tracking specific areas of their health, not merely their activity level. Before covid, wearables were often “what we might call disposable”, says Ranjit Atwal from Gartner, a research firm. People would buy them for no particular reason, wear them for a short time and put them into a drawer. It was unclear how, or indeed whether, the market for such devices would mature. The pandemic changed that because many people had to be monitored at home for health reasons. Doctors in America and Europe started seeing more elderly patients with smartwatches that relatives have bought for them in order to track their health and send alerts of any problems.

All this is assisted by the fact that people are more used to having technology help monitor and manage their lives. AI-assistants like Siri and Alexa are no longer a novelty used by a brave techie minority. Things that reflect how intimately a device knows you, like personalized playlists, are starting to feel less creepy…

Doctors in America and Europe are starting to warm up to the idea that wearables can help them take better care of their patients. Profit-oriented health-care systems, like America’s, smell greater efficiency. Instead of asking patients if they are sleeping better, for example, doctors can simply look up a chart from a wearable device. Several hospital groups in America that care for millions of patients are setting up systems that make wearables a seamless part of clinical care. Finland’s citizens can link their wearables and other personal health devices (such as smart scales) with their national health records.

Market analysts expect that, in the next five years, the wearables market will split into two categories: medical-grade devices approved by regulators for people with chronic conditions who need tracking with greater care and accuracy, and devices with less sophisticated features for healthy people who want to keep an eye on their metrics and be able to spot problems early. Leading manufacturers are expected to offer increasingly specific devices for groups such as children and the elderly…

Wearables are also transforming disease surveillance and clinical trials for new drugs, by showing how people experience a disease or a treatment in their daily lives. They make it possible, for the first time, to take the temperature, or measure the pulse, of a population rather than an individual.

There are plenty of problems to be resolved. Chief among them are concerns about privacy and discrimination based on the health data from wearables. Digital-health products built on the data are still variable in quality, though it is getting easier to sort the good from the bad. Regulators are trying to strike a balance between protecting consumers and not suppressing innovation, while also learning how to regulate a digital-health ecosystem.

However, other journals, such as The Guardian, have expressed concern about issues of privacy and control when children are tracked:

What sort of childhood is it with every move tracked, scrutinized, logged, judged? Where you cannot wander, try something new, be spontaneous – be yourself – without issuing a beeping alert from wearable, connected technology? This is helicopter parenting at its most stultifying, a constant, hovering presence…

A parent’s job is to worry about his or her child so the line between responsible supervision and cloying surveillance can be blurry, especially as childhood gives way to adolescence.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)