Sources of Inequity and Fairness Risks in Wellbeing Sensing

Han Zhang, Vedant Das Swain, Koustuv Saha, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer Mankoff

Passive sensing for wellbeing uses smartphones and wearables to continuously collect human behavioral data and applies ML/AI models to infer psychological states and behaviors (e.g., depression, cognitive load). These systems are increasingly adopted in high-stakes settings (e.g., hospitals, universities), yet fairness research remains limited---primarily to post-hoc, identity-based comparisons of model performance. However, passive sensing combines heterogeneous sensing infrastructures, indirect behavioral inference, and longitudinal deployment---characteristics that, while not exclusive to the domain, are jointly pronounced here and raise two underexplored questions: (1) what additional sources of inequity arise from these characteristics, and (2) how do such inequities propagate beyond algorithmic audits across the system lifecycle? To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 researchers and practitioners across five countries, examining how fairness risks emerge and are negotiated across the full passive sensing lifecycle. Our findings empirically characterize five situated sources of inequity (e.g., comfort with monitoring, behavioral regularity) that systematically shape fairness risks beyond identity-based attributes. We further synthesize 15 fairness risks and corresponding mitigation strategies across the lifecycle, from study design to deployment. Finally, we identify structural barriers that constrain fair practice in reality, and argue that enabling fair passive sensing requires both individual researcher efforts and ecosystem-level governance support from funders, publication venues, and deploying institutions.