How digital medicine redefines the landscape of care: Ethical and legal consequences in the case of psychiatry

Care is central to medical practice. However, care is currently being re-defined due to the computational logic that is central to digital medicine. For those with serious mental illness in psychiatry, the new landscape of care has significant ethical, legal, and phenomenological implications. The obvious and less obvious differences in care between human caregivers and technology warrant reflection. This commentary examines the nature of care in digital medicine through a case study of voice-based chatbots used in the context of mental health. Several recommendations are derived to reconcile human-centered care with risks in digital medicine.