Active Informed Consent to Boost the Application of Machine Learning in Medicine
This addresses data privacy barriers for researchers and practitioners in precision medicine, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing consent frameworks.
The paper tackles the challenge of gathering large amounts of personal data for machine learning in precision medicine by proposing Active Informed Consent (AIC) as a hybrid legal-technological tool, and it demonstrates compliance with European privacy laws.
Machine Learning may push research in precision medicine to unprecedented heights. To succeed, machine learning needs a large amount of data, often including personal data. Therefore, machine learning applied to precision medicine is on a cliff edge: if it does not learn to fly, it will deeply fall down. In this paper, we present Active Informed Consent (AIC) as a novel hybrid legal-technological tool to foster the gathering of a large amount of data for machine learning. We carefully analyzed the compliance of this technological tool to the legal intricacies protecting the privacy of European Citizens.