Key Points

• Ongoing research projects, among them the Brazilian SPIRA and SoundCov initiatives, seek to diagnose Covid-19 and severe respiratory insufficiency through the analysis of voice recordings.
• The voice recordings may also be used to infer information about various personal traits, including some considered as sensitive by data protection law.
• The deployment of such apps may promote significant benefits in the context of a pandemic, since telemedicine avoids the risks of infection, both to potential patients and to the health-care professionals, as compared to presential consultation; those benefits, however, must be evaluated in light of the ethical and data protection concerns mapped in this article.
• The operation of voice-based medical apps involves various kinds of personal data, which means that those apps must follow the requirements imposed by Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), such as the need for a legal basis for data processing and the purpose limitation of processing.
• The LGPD also provides a series of rights to users and other data subjects, such as the right to erasure and the right to information about the processing, which must be implemented by any diagnosis app.

中文翻译：

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基于语音的covid-19诊断：道德和法律挑战

关键点

• 正在进行的研究项目，其中包括巴西SPIRA和SoundCov计划，旨在通过分析录音来诊断Covid-19和严重的呼吸功能不全。
• 语音记录还可以用于推断有关各种个人特征的信息，包括一些被数据保护法认为敏感的特征。
• 与即时咨询相比，由于远程医疗避免了潜在患者和医疗保健专业人员的感染风险，因此在大流行的情况下部署此类应用程序可能会带来重大好处。但是，必须根据本文所述的道德和数据保护问题来评估这些好处。
• 基于语音的医疗应用程序的操作涉及各种个人数据，这意味着这些应用程序必须遵循巴西《通用数据保护法》（LGPD）规定的要求，例如需要数据处理的法律依据和目的限制处理。
• LGPD还为用户和其他数据主体提供了一系列权利，例如擦除权和有关处理的信息权，这些权利必须由任何诊断应用程序实施。