  Digital technology is everywhere for the benefit of our daily and
professional life. It strongly impacts our life and was crucial to maintain
professional and social activities during the COVID19 crisis. Similarly,
digital technologies are key within biomedical engineering research topics.
Innovations have been generated and introduced over the last 40 years,
demonstrating how computing and digital technologies have impacted health care.
Although the benefits of digital technology are obvious now, we are at the
convergence of several issues which makes us aware about social, societal and
environmental challenges associated with this technology. In the social domain,
digital technologies raise concern about exclusion (financial, geographical,
educational, demographical, racial, gender, language, and disabled related
exclusion) and physical and mental health. In the societal dimension, digital
technologies raise concern about politics and democracy (sovereignty and
governance, cognitive filters and citizen's engagement), privacy and security
(data acquisition and usage transparency, level of personal approval, and level
of anonymization), and economics. In the environmental dimension, digital
technologies raise concern about energy consumption and hardware production.
This paper introduces and defines these challenges for digital technology in
general, as well as when applied to health care. The objective of this paper is
to make the research community more aware about the challenges of digital
technology and to promote more transparency for innovative and responsible
research.
