Ethical and Legal Aspects of Using Brain-Computer Interface in Medicine: Protection of Patient’s Neuro Privacy

A growing application of invasive neuro-modulation in treating the diseases unresponsive to the conventional therapy or resuming lost motor functions requires a renewed look at the long-established conceptions of medical ethics such as privacy and autonomy. Through nano-chips embedded into the brain of a patient, this novel technology- Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) traces how information is encoded and decoded by neural circuits in real-time and accesses the subjective experience in a completely different way that no other medical technology could do in the past and is able to execute at present. Either in the application of the Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), the most frequently used method of the Brain-Computer Interface which involves machine brain interaction only, or during the treatment with other types of BCIs, when human to machine operation engaging both input and output communication with brain is used, the patient’s privacy raises concerns at every level of the treatment. The research looks into questions of law and ethics raised by BCI which have not yet been explored in detail in academic literature. The benchmark for the analysis is the privacy of the patient in the types of informational and decisional privacy. The issues directly relating to privacy are technical challenges in ensuring d¬¬ata security in this complicated technology handled through a wireless system, ethical and legal concerns such as the level of discreetness of the patient’s state of mind and control over it, and the legal boundaries for its disclosure to third parties, among others. It is the aim of the research, by referring primarily to the European context, to transmit ethical norms protecting privacy in general and in the physician-patient relationships in particular to the application of data protection in the field of neuro-technologies through legal regulation and to elaborate on the newly developing neuro-data conception.