Only two-thirds of U.S. healthcare consumers are OK with surgeons using digital facial recognition to avoid medical error by confirming patient identity.

And less than half would greenlight the technology for researchers using diversified image data to advance precision medicine.  

These are two key findings from a survey-based study published this month in Plos One.

Senior author Jennifer Wagner, JD, PhD, of Penn State and colleagues sent out and received back around 4,000 surveys.  

The respondent pool comprised a representatively diverse mix of the population in terms of age, geographic region, gender, racial and ethnic background, educational attainment, household income and political views.

Half the field registered their attitudes on the general use of biometrics for scenarios in which they might find themselves asked to participate.

The other 2,000 or so were specifically asked to project their openness to the use of facial recognition technology in various healthcare use cases in clinical as well as research settings.

Along with the contextualized research circumstance above, the team found a majority of respondents unfavorably disposed toward facial recognition to monitor their symptoms or emotions.

“Additional research would be useful to understand what factors are contributing to the perspectives of those who expressed they were unsure about these two uses or expressed these two uses were unacceptable,” Wagner and co-authors comment in their discussion.

Other noteworthy findings:

• 55.5% of respondents indicated they were equally worried about the privacy of medical records, DNA and facial images collected for precision health research.
• 24.8% said they would prefer to opt out of the DNA component of a study.
• 22.0% reported they would prefer to opt out of both the DNA and facial imaging component of a study.