On-line sharing of live biometric data for crowd-support : ethical issues from system design

Abstract

In this paper, we present the ethical issues that emerged while designing, developing and testing HeartLink. HeartLink is a system designed for providing remote crowd-support during challenging and sustained physical activities such as long-distance running. Information about the activity (e.g. speed, distance completed) and the athletes’ bio-data (e.g. heart rate) are shared amongst participants and on-line viewers on social networks through smartphones. On-line viewers can also ‘cheer’ the participants by pressing a specifically designed button. Once the ‘cheer button’ is pressed, a vibration is sent through the athlete’s device thus communicating crowd-support remotely and in real-time. In this paper we report the ethical implications of our approach as they emerged from a technical trial and a user observation study.