Munich Embedded Ethics Lab - MEEL
The Munich Embedded Ethics Lab (MEEL) promotes the integration of ethical aspects into the entire development process of health technologies in an integrated, collaborative and interdisciplinary way. It brings together projects that address the critical ethical, social and political issues that arise with the application of new technologies. It emphasizes work that aims to improve care and equity and reach underserved populations in healthcare. The Embedded Ethics (EE) approach combines participatory research practices with empirical bioethical analysis. The overarching goal is to support the ethically and socially responsible development of health technologies; technologies that benefit rather than harm individuals and society. To achieve this goal, EE involves ethicists in the development process from the outset to anticipate, identify and address ethical and social issues that arise early in the health technology development process; including the planning, ethical approval, design, programming, testing, review and implementation phases of the technology. Embedding ethics in all phases of health technology development will foster innovative science that helps anticipate, not just react to, ethical and social frictions in the application of health technologies.
MEEL brings together a group of projects that focus primarily on the application of EE in artificial intelligence and machine learning as a particular focus of the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine (IHEM). However, we believe that the EE method has the potential to be applied to many other areas of biomedicine and biotechnology.
Director of the Munich Embedded Ethics Lab: PD Dr. Stuart McLennan (stuart.mclennan@tum.de)
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