HELT 2025 Symposium
April 24, 2025
UNIVIE represented COMMUTE at the 2025 Symposium of Health, Law, and Technology (HELT)
On April 24, the 2025 Symposium of Health, Law and Technology (HELT) took place in Brussels, Belgium.
This year’s theme –“One Health: Advancing Global Health through Law and Technology” ̶ brought together legal professionals, industry leaders, patient advocates, policymakers, and regulatory experts from diverse sectors to explore contributions to the topic from legal, technological and ethical perspectives.
Rodessa May Marquez and Alexandra Marginean from the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the University of Vienna attended the HELT symposium as representatives of the COMMUTE (Comorbidity Mechanisms Utilized in Healthcare) project. They organized a workshop together with two other projects BBMRI.at (Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructure Austria) and SYNTHIA (Synthetic Data Generation framework for integrated validation of use cases and AI healthcare applications).
The workshop examined how emerging technologies in AI and Big Data Analytics can be harnessed to improve disease surveillance in a legally and ethically responsible manner.
In the first part of the workshop, participants were invited to reflect on a word or phrase they associate with the use of AI in disease surveillance, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. These associations were later categorized as positive, negative, or neutral, leading to a lively discussion around the perceived risks and opportunities of integrating AI into public health infrastructure.
The second part of the workshop focused on the tension between the right to information and the ethical principle of non-maleficence. Participants were encouraged to consider a patient-centered perspective in evaluating the ethical implications of AI-driven recommender systems, particularly those capable of predicting an individual's likelihood of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. The discussion highlighted the importance of informed patient choice, the need for clear thresholds before disclosing such information, and the role of preventive strategies. Additionally, the discussion has also raised a critical question, namely: to what extent should such information be shared with next of kin when patients opt not to be informed?
The workshop concluded with a brief presentation of the discussion outcomes by representatives from all three projects.