On 26 September 2026, SmartCHANGE joins the EACME Annual Conference 2026 in Leuven, Belgium, represented by our partners from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
About the event
The EACME Annual Conference 2026 marks a remarkable milestone: the 40th anniversary of both the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics and the KU Leuven Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law. Hosted in the historic university city of Leuven, home to the oldest university in the Low Countries, the conference brings together established and emerging scholars in medical ethics and bioethics for four decades of collaborative reflection and forward-looking dialogue.
The 2026 edition provides a platform to foster new collaborations, deepen understanding of long-standing and emerging bioethical challenges, and reflect on the field's collective responsibility to address them.
SmartCHANGE at the event
On 26 September, SmartCHANGE is represented at the Health Inequities and Epistemic Justice panel with a presentation entitled "Conditional Vulnerability: How Digital Health Systems Create Exclusion Among Older Adults and Persons with Disabilities".
The paper argues that vulnerability in digital health is not a personal trait, it is the distance between the actual person and the imagined user a system was designed for. Through a case study of digital health services in Belgium, the presentation examines how systems built for "average users" systematically exclude the very populations they are meant to serve, producing what the research terms a vulnerabilisation loop: digital exclusion leads to data underrepresentation, which leads to biased AI and worse care outcomes.
While the research focuses on older adults and persons with disabilities rather than children, it speaks directly to SmartCHANGE's core work on AI-based health tools: who the data and design treat as the norm determines who benefits. Representativeness is not only a technical question, it is a rights issue.
The presentation introduces a new analytical framework, the 3P × AAAQ Matrix, combining human rights principles (Provision, Participation, Protection) with the right to health (Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, Quality) to assess inclusion in digital health systems.
Learn more on the official EACME 2026 website.