Milestone Retrospect — Untangle Care
The road so far …
Introduction
As we conclude the second milestone of our “Untangle Care” project, we thought it would be a good opportunity to provide an update on what we have been working on.
As a reminder, the goal of this project is to develop IOTA-based tools that will allow healthcare data to flow between different healthcare stakeholders and systems (e.g., Electronic Medical Records, Internet of Medical Things devices, Personal Health Records, etc.) in a secure, patient-controlled and healthcare-interoperable way (using the Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources — FHIR — standard).
The purpose of this article is not to describe every single component in detail, but rather to provide an overview and references to the achievements throughout this 6-month journey. The topics we will touch upon include:
- Tangle.NET: C# IOTA client library
- FHIR: GDPR, documentation, and Synthea
- Logging: IOTA + IPFS based logging system
Tangle.NET
As some of you might be aware, Tangle.NET is a C# IOTA client library, which got three major updates in the last milestone, being:
MAM
When the milestone began, the C# MAM library was not compatible with the javascript implementation. This has been changed to compatibility not only to the javascript MAM implementation but also to mam.ts.
IOTA Area Codes (IAC)
“IACs are a method for tagging IOTA transactions with a geo-location, which allows them to be fetched, based on their location.” You are now able to use IAC from C# (.NET standard only), using the corresponding NuGet package.
ZMQ
The ZMQ module allows you to subscribe to events happening in an IRI node. You can read more about that here. This will enable C# IOTA applications to be developed in a “Hollywood Principle” manner. The package is available for .NET 4.6.1 and .NET standard.
In addition to that, you are now able to use PatriQs’ documentation to kick-start your IOTA development. Besides covering the basics of Tangle.Net, it gives an excellent overview of IOTA for beginners as well.
FHIR
If you have missed our last update on the FHIR side, you can read it here. In a nutshell, this update covered two key topics for this project: GDPR compliance and validation of the FHIR implementation (using “synthetic” patient data)
GDPR (and HIPAA) are undoubtedly part of the biggest challenges for any public, immutable technology, like IOTA, that deals with protected health information. This is why we invested a lot of our time into that topic, which ultimately led to a peer-reviewed research article that has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).
Our testing efforts with the “synthetic” patient data generator tool (Synthea) showed that it is indeed feasible to exchange healthcare data fast, secure and borderless on top of IOTA . That being said, we have made available two proof of concept applications that you can experiment with and test:
- A basic version of the FHIR API that is able to create and read FHIR resources. The API is hosted on a limited Azure environment, so the response times will be faster in a production environment.
- Our tool to create and upload Synthea generated data. This makes testing the API easier since it abstracts the REST communication. With the tool, you can create as many patients as you wish and upload their healthcare records to the tangle individually. Please note, that the tool is a pre-release we currently use internally for our QA process. Therefore bugs may occur. As Synthea is written in Java, the JDK (Java Development Kit) needs to be installed on your computer. The GitHub release page includes all the information that you should need to get you started.
In addition to the above, the first iteration of the documentation is available. The structure orientates itself by arc42, a template for documentation and communication of software and system architecture. Since it is currently a work in progress, it is subject to change and will be updated along with the software it describes.
Logging
As described in our initial blog post about an IOTA based logging system, we think one of the biggest values of a distributed ledger is transparency. That’s why we were glad to see that our first proof of concept for an IOTA based logging system in combination with IPFS got a lot of attention on different channels, for example, Hacker News. Furthermore, a lot of people seemed to be interested in our tutorials to combine IPFS and IOTA.
During the process of developing the logging system, we discovered multiple opportunities to improve the next generation of the web. IOTA, for example, makes it possible to host completely free Dapps and is also capable of storing the metadata of the next generation of web. We’ll continue to explore the web3 or distributed web and potential applications as well as requirements. Even though this isn’t part of our IOTA grant, we are going to use IOTA for these projects, since it fulfils one of the most important requirements: the capability to use the infrastructure without the mandatory requirement to own tokens specific to the network.
Outlook
Looking forward, the next milestone will address three different topics, that should ultimately enable you to build FHIR compatible, tangle based healthcare applications.
- With the new MAM version right around the corner, Tangle.NET will be extended so you can use MAM+ from C#. Additionally, we will switch our FHIR applications to the new MAM version.
- The FHIR API will iteratively be updated with all REST functionality specified within the FHIR documentation.
- To work with the FHIR API in a nontechnical manner, a basic web interface to administrate a patients EHR will be developed. This will not only demonstrate how to make use of the FHIR API but also be the first step to develop a tangle-based patient management system.
If you are interested in updates to any of the mentioned topics, feel free to join us on discord.
