Ethical Fairness in Ubiquitous Health Sensing without Known Attributes
In ubiquitous and mobile health systems, computational models infer human states from wearable, behavioral, and physiological sensing data. In these settings, high accuracy alone is insufficient; models must act ethically and equitably across diverse people, contexts, and devices. However, fairness methods that rely on demographic or heterogeneous attributes during training are difficult to enforce because such attributes are often unavailable, privacy-sensitive, regulated, or undesirable to collect. Conventional parity-based fairness can also violate ethical principles by trading off subgroup performance. To address this challenge, we present Flare, Fisher-guided LAtent-subgroup learning with do-no-harm REgularization, a demographic- and heterogeneous-attribute-agnostic framework that aligns human-centered fairness with ethical principles for ubiquitous and mobile sensing. Flare leverages optimization geometry, particularly Fisher Information, to regularize curvature and uncover latent disparities in model behavior without demographic or heterogeneous attributes. By integrating representation, loss, and curvature signals, it identifies hidden performance strata and refines them through collaborative but do-no-harm optimization, enhancing subgroup performance while preserving ethical balance. We also introduce BHE (Beneficence-Harm Avoidance-Equity), a metric suite that operationalizes ethical fairness beyond statistical parity. Across mobile physiological, behavioral, and clinical sensing datasets, including EDA, OhioT1DM, IHS, and Percept-R, Flare improves ethical fairness over state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation, interpretability, and loss-landscape analyses show that these gains arise from flatter optimization geometry, simpler decision rules, and do-no-harm latent-subgroup adaptation. Runtime analysis supports the practicality of Flare for resource-constrained sensing deployments.