Jana Sedlakova

Visiting Student

October - November 2023

Jana Sedlakova is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics of the University of Zurich. In 2022, she joined a complementary PhD Program “DSI Excellence PhD Program” of the Digital Society Initiative to delve into societal and ethical issues of digitalization. She is also a manager of two scientific communities: Ethics and Health at the DSI. Finally, she is affiliated with the Institute of Implementation Science in Healthcare to work on more empirically oriented research.

Her research is at the intersection of medical ethics, philosophy of technology, ethics of AI and health research. She focuses on the ethical and epistemic challenges and requirements regarding human-AI interaction with a particular focus on healthcare conversational agents used in the context of mental health and well-being. She is also involved in projects focusing on the public legitimacy of digital research methods, the challenges and requirements of the use of digital unstructured data in health research and the use of technologies in shared decision-making.

In her research, she aims to bridge the normative, theoretical methods with empirical research. Currently, she is developing an empirical study focusing on six different interaction styles of chatbots asking questions related to mental health and well-being. With this study, she aims to investigate how the different design choices concerning the humanization of chatbots affect users’ experience, their willingness to disclose information, and the quality of the data obtained.