Envisioning Possibilities and Challenges of AI for Personalized Cancer Care

TL;DR

The study addresses disparities in cancer survivorship care, especially among minority groups, by exploring how AI could address informational and psychosocial gaps. It employs a qualitative approach with six semi-structured interviews to assess survivors' needs, attitudes toward AI, and perceived risks. The findings reveal a strong demand for personalized, culturally sensitive resources and continuous support, while highlighting concerns about privacy, loss of human touch, and echo chambers. The work argues that AI should complement, not replace, broader structural changes in healthcare and proposes a 'Why personalization?' guiding principle to frame participatory, context-aware design.

Abstract

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, including in caring for cancer survivors, has gained significant interest. However, gaps remain in our understanding of how such AI systems can provide care, especially for ethnic and racial minority groups who continue to face care disparities. Through interviews with six cancer survivors, we identify critical gaps in current healthcare systems such as a lack of personalized care and insufficient cultural and linguistic accommodation. AI, when applied to care, was seen as a way to address these issues by enabling real-time, culturally aligned, and linguistically appropriate interactions. We also uncovered concerns about the implications of AI-driven personalization, such as data privacy, loss of human touch in caregiving, and the risk of echo chambers that limit exposure to diverse information. We conclude by discussing the trade-offs between AI-enhanced personalization and the need for structural changes in healthcare that go beyond technological solutions, leading us to argue that we should begin by asking, ``Why personalization?''