AIMS
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About The Project
The AIMS project aims to enhance patient safety in European hospitals by combining continuous wearable‑sensor monitoring with AI‑based early warning models that detect clinical deterioration sooner and more reliably. Its purpose is to enable earlier intervention, reduce preventable adverse events on general wards, and strengthen overall quality of care through intelligent, trustworthy decision support.
AIMS brings together four complementary partners: JKU‑MED, providing clinical expertise; RISC, contributing advanced algorithms and signal processing; FIVESQUARE, ensuring robust technical development and implementation; and innovethic, integrating ethics, safety, governance, and societal considerations from the start. Together, the consortium ensures that AIMS is not only innovative and clinically valuable, but also responsible, secure, and aligned with European values.
The Ethical Challenges
AIMS faces the challenge of navigating complex questions of fairness, bias, and moral responsibility as AI systems increasingly influence clinical decisions. Ensuring transparency and accountability in such sensitive environments is a central ethical concern.
AI in critical care brings key safety challenges. False positives can overload staff and resources, while false negatives risk delayed interventions — making rigorous testing and human oversight essential.
Limited explainability creates uncertainty. Black‑box algorithms can make decisions harder to interpret for clinicians, patients, and families, raising questions about accountability and trust.
Wider ethical risks must be addressed. These include data privacy, potential bias in training data, increased workload for clinical staff, and concerns about shifting roles between humans and machines.
Our Path To Trustworthy AI
We address the ethical challenges in AIMS through a comprehensive set of measures:
- Continuous training for the project consortium on key ethical topics — such as dignity, bias, and paternalism — as well as compliance requirements including the AI Act, MDR, and GDPR
- A dedicated Ethics Board that reviews critical questions from multiple perspectives and guides decision‑making throughout the project
- A project-wide Code of Ethics that anchors shared principles and responsibilities
- Systematic value analysis across all stakeholder groups, following the Value‑Based Engineering (VBE) process
- Thorough assessment of ethical and algorithmic risks, with concrete design recommendations to minimise potential harms and strengthen trust
Testimonial
‘innovethic supports us in understanding ethical issues not just as a marginal topic, but as an integral part of our research work. Thanks to their expertise, we are able to design technological innovations responsibly – in the interests of patients, society and all stakeholders involved.’
