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May 2022

EDGE in the Healthcare Nutrition Industry

By Blog

By LF Edge Community members Utpal Mangla (Industry EDGE Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform);  Atul Gupta (Lead Data Architect – IBM); and  Luca Marchi (Industry EDGE and Distribute Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform)

Diet and Nutrition plays a vital role in healthcare and often it is still left behind by medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, and alternative medical care professionals. Whether patient is recovering from regular sickness, injuries, surgeries, or chronic illness – all of them need special care for diet and nutrition provided to the patients. The need is to provide enough nutrition at pre-determined frequencies for faster recovery and making sure the normalcy returns for the most patients in moderate time and at optimal expense. But the diet and nutrition guidance provided is either very generic or not monitored and adjusted as per patients’ vitals and recovery progression. 

These traditional mechanisms of feeding the health, diet, nutrition tracking data to medical practitioners is one-way mechanism and siloed decision making is based on this disparate data and not tied up for common benefits of the patients.

With the ongoing digital transformation of the healthcare, there is organic growth of edge devices in the hands of patients, healthcare staff such as fit-bit, cellphones, nutrition scales, smart kitchen, and bed-care devices, etc. The questions are – Where do we take it from here? What do we do with this explosion of edge data? Are we creating another set of data-silos?

Edge computing has the solutions for most of these problems and it can provide connectivity to use this data effectively and efficiently. This can converge all the data silos from traditional devices, healthcare facilities, human diet, and nutrition data into common repository such as ‘Data producers at Edge’, which can feed the data into cloud computing environments. The specialized healthcare cloud computing environments are now available, but they lack the data ingestion components. 

The ‘Data producers at Edge’ ingest the healthcare data into cloud computing environments from the Edge devices, healthcare facilities, et al completing the full cycle of data usage. This complete data cycle can now start benefiting patients, their families and as much gain efficiency for healthcare staff and facilities. Hospitals and alternative health professionals can start treating patients remotely using this new paraphernalia of devices, solutions, and inter-connectivity. 

These Data producers have rich data about patients’ daily health, vitals, physical vicinities, living conditions, walk-score, mobility, and assistance provided, etc. The net impact of using this data in combined and constructive way can not only open new horizons for healthcare but can start a new journey with Edge transformation which is yet to be realized. There is a potential of new industry disruptor in this area by leveraging benefits of Edge, Cloud computing, IoT devices, Patient Literacy, et al. The combination is self-serviced components and interconnectivity which can expand and scale on demand, as needed and provide solutions to areas of high demand and growth. It is now known that many healthcare areas can only be scaled and gain service efficiency by technology solutions and not by putting more healthcare facilities and professionals. Also, the traditional diet and nutrition methods have always played effective role in patient recovery, which can yield accurate, efficient, and robust healthcare solutions if used in conjunction with Edge and IoT advancements.

This full cyclic approach will tie together the Diet and Nutrition aspects to other healthcare areas, components, and capabilities. The basics of patient’s recovery progression can ultimately start to play its role in more connected manner and predictive care can replace the reactive care approach. 

The Edge data can be used to generate patient analytics and align it to diet and nutrition data to come up with new predictive care capabilities. The health care staff can adjust, re-calibrate the exercises based on existing and proposed diet and nutrition for the patients. This can even extend into improving the supply-chain of the products and services needed for the healthcare industry.

The diet and nutrition data, combined with sophisticated cloud compute can yield better and improved predictive care for the patients and move to new era in Healthcare Digital Edge Transformation

EdgeX Foundry Celebrates 5 Years, Issues Kamakura Release

By Announcement

Community’s 10th release comes at project’s fifth anniversary and adds new features related to metrics collection, security, and configurability 

SAN FRANCISCO – May 12, 2022EdgeX Foundry, a highly-scalable and flexible open source framework that facilitates interoperability between devices and applications at the IoT edge, and a  Linux Foundation project under the LF Edge umbrella, today announced the release of version 2.2 of EdgeX, codenamed ‘Kamakura.’  It is the project’s tenth release and coincides with the celebration of EdgeX Foundry’s fifth anniversary.

“Many new startup businesses don’t last 5 years, and for EdgeX to reach its fifth birthday while consistently releasing twice a year since its inception is quite the achievement,” said Jim White, chairman of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CTO of IoTSystems.  “The project continues to see global adoption growth, especially in places like China, and its success is a testament to both the need for an open edge/IoT platform, as well as the dedication and support of a fantastic development community.”

“Having set itself apart as the de facto open source IoT framework for edge computing in just five years is no small feat,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “The continued growth and success of EdgeX Foundry is a testament to its strong community and ability to innovate in real time. Congratulations to the entire ecosystem on this  milestone,  as well as the release of Kamakura.”  

While a ‘dot’ release, EdgeX Kamakura still contains a number of new features while still maintaining backward compatibility with all 2.x releases.  

With the Kamakura release, EdgeX has added: 

  •  micro service metrics/telemetry collection capability (beta) – making it easier for adopters to monitor the health and status of the EdgeX services
  • delayed start services – allowing services to be added and started anytime and still receive security tokens without the need for a restart of the platform
  • new camera device services – allowing improved capabilities to command, control and interface with ONVIF and USB cameras
  • dynamic device profiles – allowing device profiles to be modified over time without needing to remove and re-add devices/sensors
  • V2 of the CLI – an update of the command line interface making it compatible with EdgeX 2.x releases while also adding 100% coverage of the REST APIs

Learn more about the Kamakura release on the EdgeX Foundry Wiki site or on the blog post

EdgeX Foundry Tech Talks

The EdgeX community will be presenting a new series of “EdgeX Foundry Tech Talks,” designed to help people get started with EdgeX. The series begins May 24  and will run weekly through June.  Developers and adopters can register for the series at the following links:

 

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open-source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 

EdgeX Foundry Turns 5 Years Old & Issues its 10th Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee Chair

EdgeX Foundry, an LF Edge project, turned five years old in April and celebrated with its 10th release!

Today, the project announced the release of Kamakura – version 2.2 of the edge/IoT platform.  EdgeX has consistently released two versions a year (spring and fall) since its founding in 2017.  Looking back to the founding and announcement of the project at Hannover Messe 2017, I would be lying if I was to say I expected the project to be where it is today.

Many new startup businesses don’t last five years. For EdgeX to celebrate five years, steadily provide new releases of the platform each year, and continue to grow its community of adopters is quite an achievement.  It speaks both to the need for an open edge / IoT platform and the commitment and hard work of the developers on the project.  I am very proud of what this community has accomplished.

We’ll take a closer look at EdgeX highlights over the past five years in an upcoming blog post, so for now, let’s dive into the Kamakura release. 

 

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Kamakura Features

While this “dot” release follows on the heels of the project’s first ever long-term support release (Jakarta in the fall of 2021), the Kamakura release still contains a number of new features while still maintaining backward compatibility with all 2.x releases.  Notably, with this release, EdgeX has added:

  • Metrics Telemetry collection: EdgeX is about collecting sensor/device information and making that data available to analytics packages and enterprise systems in a consistent way so it can be acted on.  However, EdgeX had only minimal means to report on its own health or status.  An adopter could watch EdgeX service container memory or CPU usage or use the “ping” facility to make sure the service was still responsive, but that is about it.  In the Kamakura release, new service level metrics can be collected and sent through the EdgeX message bus to be consumed and monitored.  Some initial metrics collection is provided in the core data service (ex: number of events and reading persisted) for this release, but the framework for doing this system wide is now in place to offer more in the next release or allow an adopter to instrument other services to report their metrics telemetry as they see fit.  The metrics information can be easily subscribed to by a time series database, dashboard or custom monitoring application.

 

  • Delayed Start Services:  When EdgeX is running with security enabled, an initialization service (called security-secretstore-setup) provides each EdgeX micro service with a token which is used to access the EdgeX secrets store (provided by Vault).  These tokens have a time to live (TTL) which means if they were not used or renewed, they expired.  This created problems for services that may need to start later – especially those that are going to connect to future sensors/devices.  Furthermore, not all EdgeX services are known when the platform initializes.  An adopter may choose to add new connectors (both north and south) all the time to address new needs.   These types of issues and others often meant that adopters often had to shutdown EdgeX and restart all of EdgeX in order to provide new security tokens to all services.  In Kamakura, this issue has been addressed with a new service that uses mutual authentication TLS and exchanges a SPIFFE X.509 SVID for getting secret store tokens.  This new service allows a service to get or renew a token used to access the EdgeX secrets store anytime and not just at the bootstrapping / initialization of EdgeX as a whole.

 

  • New Camera Device Services:  While EdgeX somewhat supported connectivity to ONVIF cameras through a camera device service, the service was incomplete (for example not allowing the camera’s PTZ capability to be accessed).  With Kamakura, EdgeX will now have two camera device services.  A new ONVIF camera device service is more complete and tested against server popular camera devices.  It allows for PTZ and even the discovery of ONVIF compliant cameras.  A second camera service – a USB camera service – will help manage and monitor simple webcams.  Importantly, EdgeX will, through the USB camera service, be able to get a USB camera’s video stream to other packages (such as an AI/ML engine) to incorporate visual inference results into the EdgeX data sensor fusion capability.

 

  • Dynamic Device Profiles: in prior releases, device profiles were considered mostly static.  That is, once a device profile was used and associated to a device or any other EdgeX object like an event/reading, it was not allowed to change.  One could not, for example, have an empty device profile and add device resources (the sensor points collected by a device service) later as more details of the sensor or use case emerged.  With the Kamakura release, device profiles are much more dynamic in nature.  New resources can be added all the time.  Elements of the device profile can change over time.  This allows device profiles to be more flexible and adaptive to the sensors and use case needs without having to remove and re-add devices all the time.

 

  • V2 of the CLI:  EdgeX has had a command line interface tool for several releases.  But the tool was not completely updated to EdgeX 2.0 until this latest release.  For that matter, the CLI did not offer the ability to call on all 100% of the EdgeX APIs.  With Kamakura, the CLI now provides 100% coverage of the REST APIs (any call that can be done via REST can be done through the CLI) in addition to making the CLI tool compatible with EdgeX 2.0 instances.  Several new features were added as well to include tab completion, use of the registry to provide configuration, and improved result outputs.

The EdgeX community worked on many other features/fixes and behind the scenes improvements to include:

  • Updated LLRP/RFID device service and application services
  • Added or updated GPIO and CoAP services 
  • Ability to build EdgeX services on Windows platform (providing optional inclusion of ZMQ libraries as needed)
  • CORs enablement
  • Added additional testing – especially around the optional use of services
  • Added testing to the GUI
  • Optimized the dev ops CI/CD pipelines
  • Kubernetes Helm Chart example for EdgeX
  • Added linting (the automated checking of source code for programmatic, stylistic and security issues) part of the regular build checks and tests on all service pull requests
  • Formalized release and planning meeting schedule
  • Better tracking of project decisions through new GitHub project boards

Tech Talks

When EdgeX first got started, we provided a series of webinars called Tech Talks to help educate people on what EdgeX is and how it works.  We are announcing that a new Tech Talk webinar series will begin May 24 and run weekly through June.  The topic list includes:

  •   May 24 – Getting Started with EdgeX
  •   June 7 – Build an EdgeX Application Service
  •   June 14 – Build an EdgeX Device Service
  •   June 21 – Creating a Device Profile
  •   June 28 – Getting started with EdgeX Snaps

These talks will be presented by distinguished members of our community.  We are going to livestream them through YouTube at 9am PDT on the appointed days.  These new talks will help provide instruction in the new EdgeX 2.0 APIs introduced with the Ireland release.  You can register for the talks here:

What’s Next: Fall Release – “Levski”

Planning for the fall 2022 release of EdgeX – codenamed Levski – is underway and will be reported on this site soon.  As part of the Kamakura release cycle, several architectural decision records were created which set the foundation for many new features in the fall release.  This includes a north-south messaging subsystem and standardization of units of measure in event/readings. 

 EdgeX is 5, but its future still looks long and bright.