Ethical considerations for "Internet of Things" in research to advance global development

There are an estimated 25 billion networked devices and growing at an annual rate of nearly 20 percent with the Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and services industry valued at nearly $100 billion annually (Biggs et al. 2016). From mobile phones to sensor networks, these connected devices gather and transmit data across a range of contexts worldwide. In low-resource communities, IoT technologies and services are beginning to play a critical role in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, providing objective data to improve monitoring of the goals and helping investigators to shift from implementation to actual measured impact (E. A. Thomas 2016). For example, sensors are used to ensure that vaccines remain within required temperatures during distribution (Chaudhri, Borriello, and Anderson 2012), borewell pumps supply water in rural communities consistently (Wilson, Coyle, and Thomas 2017), and suitability of wheelchair designs (Gandhi et al. 2017), all of which improves accountability and contributes to positive impact. However, there is increasing concern that IoT-enabled research methods can lead to new ethical challenges and negative impacts on communities (Eubanks 2018).The ethical challenges raised by monitoring and data collection in communities are reminiscent of the ethical issues that have accompanied the collection of genomic data (Radin 2017; Reardon 2017). Given the complexity of the potential challenges, this chapter initiates a discussion on responsible and ethical use of IoT in global development research by providing a brief overview of types of projects using IoT, relevance of existing ethical guidelines, and some considerations for investigators.