The Digital Medical Ethics Network offers annual fellowships for researchers working on ethical issues related to the digitalisation of healthcare. As part of their fellowship, each fellow gives a public lecture reporting on their work.
Ethics at Play: Eine Roadmap für die Entwicklung von Serious Games zur psychischen Gesundheit junger Menschen
Invitation to the DiMEN Fellowship Lecture 2025 in Cooperation with the GamKi-Wer-Wie-Was ELSA HUB (held in german)
Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 11:00 AM, via Zoom
Digital gamified interventions are increasingly being discussed as a solution to mental health challenges faced by young people. This lecture presents a prototype of an empirically grounded, principle-based Ethics Roadmap—an interactive, adaptable tool that offers ethical guidance for developers. The roadmap is being developed as part of the Horizon Europe project ASPbelong, which is creating a collaboratively played augmented reality app aimed at promoting adolescent mental health. It includes explanations of key ethical principles and good practice examples in three areas:
(i) the role and responsibility of (co-)developers,
(ii) the design of game mechanisms, and
(iii) questions surrounding usage.
Dr. Wanda Spahl is a social scientist whose research focuses on health policy and care practices, particularly concerning marginalized groups and digital technologies. She has published a scoping review on gamification and mental health in JMIR Serious Games. Dr. Spahl is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biomedical Ethics and Health Ethics at Karl Landsteiner Private University for Health Sciences in Krems, Austria. From 2018 to 2022, she was a university assistant at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna, where she completed her dissertation titled “From Medical Care to Citizenship.”
She is currently a Digital Medical Ethics Network Fellow at the Junior Professorship for Medical Ethics with a focus on digitalization at the University of Potsdam.
[Click here for her full research profile.]
The DiMEN Fellowship is designed to give outstanding early-career researchers the freedom to explore new topics in digital health ethics. Fellows are free to define their own goals for the duration of their stay—be it completing a book chapter, taking the first steps into a new research area, seeking new collaborators for a grant proposal, or preparing the proposal itself. As part of their stay, fellows give a lecture on a topic of their choice.
Dr. Wanda Spahl
Karl Landsteiner Privatuniversität für Gesundheitswissenschaften
Registration
To attend the DiMEN Fellowship Lecture, registration is required. Please fill out the form below and click “send”. You will receive all information required via email.