Ensuring Social Justice in AI for Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great potential in healthcare, but it also raises deep ethical concerns as it often discriminates vulnerable groups, amplifying systemic inequalities and preventing equitable access to healthcare. Trustworthy AI is not sufficient to avoid this risk. Bias-free AI systems can indeed still be deeply unjust, if they do not embed social justice principles; and the current ethics and governance frameworks that steer the design, development and use of AI tend to perpetuate forms of injustice both at the local and at the global level.

Indeed, they mostly neglect the consideration of perspectives and values other than the Western ones, especially those from the Global South (Colonialist AI). JustHealth aims at filling this gap by creating the first doctoral program in the EU and beyond to ensure social justice is adequately considered in the design, development and deployment of AI in healthcare.

By integrating ethical, governance, engineering, clinical, and co-creation expertise, JustHealth will:

• Elaborate a robust decolonized ethics and governance framework for AI in healthcare and tailor it for 2 paradigmatic use cases involving vulnerable people: freezing of gait (FOG) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD), respectively affecting the older population of Western countries, and the younger population of countries in the Global South
• Test and validate the framework
• Investigate its transferability, also providing insights for sector-specific standards

The framework will contribute to the deployment of just and trustworthy AI systems that can effectively contribute to just healthcare both at local and global level. JustHealth will offer to 8 DCs an ambitious doctoral programme and exposure to leading EU, South African and US organizations, inc. not academic ones. The project will thus create a brand-new profile of responsible researchers, with a transdisciplinary expertise, and able to address the complex challenges posed by AI.