Facilitating Ethics Application and Review for Interdisciplinary Human-Participant Research via Software-Based Guidance and Standardization

Abstract Research on human-technology interaction has become highly interdisciplinary. As a consequence, many fields are now performing research on human participants. From an ethical point of view, such research requires careful consideration of the well-being of all involved persons. Review boards for assessing ethical aspects of human-participant research are therefore confronted with steadily rising application volumes. Here we present a software-based approach (“Ethiktool”) that facilitates ethics application and review procedures via a user-oriented dialogue system. Based on the user’s responses in the guided dialogue, the ethics application as well as the information and consent forms to be used for the study participants are automatically created. This ensures consistency and standardization of all documents, which benefits all involved parties alike: the individual researchers applying for ethics approval and the review boards (who both can focus on ethical content) as well as the study participants (who can rely on transparent and standardized information forms). The software-based guidance helps to raise awareness of ethical issues in research, which is highly relevant in view of the ever- increasing possibilities of gathering data from human participants. Our approach will thus foster ethical responsibility of academic institutions toward a broad range of scientific disciplines and society as a whole.