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July 2022

Preventive Healthcare using Intelligent Edge IoT Computing – ‘Round the Clock EHR’

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By:  Utpal Mangla – Industry EDGE Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform;  Atul Gupta – Lead Data Architect – IBMLuca Marchi – Industry EDGE and Distribute Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform; and Saurabh Agrawal – Practice Lead, Network Cloud, 5G & EDGE 

Preventive healthcare has always been taught and talked about in most healthcare institutions, but seldom practiced. The collective benefits are immense, and the realization of a fraction of those benefits can help optimize the cost-delivery aspects of healthcare services. It can also act as a catalyst for scaling healthcare services for growing populations in most parts of the world. 

The common issues in implementing Preventive Healthcare include providing guidance, educating the vulnerable population masses, and interacting with healthcare professionals. Most of the challenges in regular screenings or monitoring of diabetes, cholesterol, cancer, and mental health are known cost and labor related issues.

Technology has helped to achieve some primary objectives, but the ultimate goal is still far away. IoT and Robotics solutions have been deployed in healthcare facilities and continue to advance quickly.  But with new tools, techniques, and cloud infrastructure,  it’s time for innovative new solutions that come with  emerging IoT devices, like increased connectivity, speed, and lower costs. 

 

Intelligent Edge IoT can provide intense data gathering and processing before sending the prepared data into the Health Ecosystem. Early on, IoT’s were mostly sensors used to gather data and were often cumbersome when it came to software code updates, and they didn’t have enough compute power to run any data processing. The new generation of intelligent IoT’s, which can be deployed at the Edge, can compute and process data ahead of sending it to Cloud computing functions for more sophisticated analysis, including machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

These intelligent IoT’s once deployed as human wearables, facility sensors, etc. can transform EHR (Electronic Health Record) to next generation 24x7x365 EHR (Round the Clock EHR)

This innovation of ‘Round the Clock EHR’ can transform the healthcare industry by bringing healthcare professionals much closer to patients in understanding and diagnosing medical issues early on. It can continuously stream and feed data to ML (machine learning), DL (deep learning) algorithms to help and improve AI solutions. The risk factors can be constantly monitored, thresholds can be adjusted and re-calibrated in real-time with sophisticated software. The Preventive healthcare can not only detect the early signs but also feed it to research facilities for new research programs and eliminate unnecessary analysis. 

The Preventive care strategies which also encompass social and environmental conditions can now be monitored with the ‘Round the Clock EHR’, which contains the patient or potential-patient data along with their detailed data on living conditions, geographical conditions, social setup which may trigger onset of a disease or unfavorable conditions. On a larger scale, the Healthcare ecosystem data and ‘Round the Clock EHR’ can provide feed into wider studies to generate health patterns as people move and Preventive Healthcare can lead to new advancements.

As referenced in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537222/ [Prevention Strategies Lisa A. Kisling; Joe M Das.] – Primary prevention consists of measures aimed at a susceptible population or individual. Secondary prevention emphasizes early disease detection, and its target is healthy-appearing individuals with subclinical forms of the disease. Tertiary prevention targets both the clinical and outcome stages of a disease.

Analyzing these 3 preventive healthcare areas from the ‘Data and Intelligent Edge IoT Lens’, it is apparent that the commonality is gathering, processing, and providing good quality round-the-clock granular data to most sophisticated ML, DL algorithms can definitely transform this area of healthcare transformation.

Our advancing society needs blend of medical and technology research implemented in a way to foster growth, scalability, improvements at lower cost and implementation cycles. These de-coupled solutions are easy to implement and promote wider Healthcare ecosystem in our connected social network.

References: 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537222/ [Prevention Strategies Lisa A. Kisling; Joe M Das.]

Congratulations to the Recipients of the 2022 EdgeX Awards!

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry

By Jim White, outgoing EdgeX Foundary TSC Chair

Each year since its founding, EdgeX Foundry awards at least four members of its contributing community with Contribution and Innovation awards.  On this fifth anniversary of the project’s founding, we honored seven distinguished engineers for their efforts on the project.

Innovation Award

Presented to individuals who have provided the most innovative solution to the open-source project over the past year

Byron Nevis and Jim Wang (both from Intel) designed and implemented the new “Delayed Start Services” security capability which is an innovative way to handle providing security tokens to services that start after the EdgeX security framework has started and already handed out tokens to all the known services.  Bryon and Jim have led most EdgeX security efforts over the past two years.  But this year, they provided some real innovation around securely storing secrets, distributing secrets, and making secrets available to other services.  Their innovation will allow adopters to add new device services and application services to EdgeX over time and as use cases demand without requiring a restart of the system.

Anthony Casagrande and Marc Fuller (both from Intel) have been instrumental in Intel’s use of EdgeX to show how it can be a platform in support of retail edge use cases.  Anthony/Marc’s work has provided both a device service and an application service to ingest and use RFID information via the LLRP (Low Level Reader Protocol) which is used in bar code reading equipment found in many retail store locations.  In addition to their inventions of these ingesting and using services, Anthony and Marc have found (and in some cases fixed) a number of bugs and have identified many needed features (submitting more than 25 Github issues) that real world adopters of the platform need.

Emilo Reyes (again from Intel – there seems to be a theme here!) has been a contributor to the EdgeX DevOps team for the last few years and has been a vital part of making the EdgeX community a better, more streamlined community. Emilio has passion for quality and with his experience around unit testing, has contributed hundreds of tests for our Jenkins global pipeline libraries providing us continuous confidence in our ability to deliver quality code. Emilio also has a passion for automation and has been a driving force behind much of our GitHub automation for EdgeX.   For instance, he created automated management of GitHub labels and milestones from a central repository, greatly reducing the number of repetitive tasks needed to manage labels/milestones across 20+ repositories. 

Contribution Award

Recognizes individuals who have contributed leadership and helped EdgeX Foundry advance and continue momentum in the past year.

 

Iain Anderson (from IOTech Systems) – has been a solid contributor, working group leader, and architect/thought leader since the founding of EdgeX in 2017.  As Device Service chairman, he has overseen several releases (major and minor) and is currently responsible for 11 active EdgeX device services and helping to usher in 4 more that are in active development.  He is the project’s first and foremost authority in C development and personally handles most of the C device service and SDK development.  Iain has over 530 commits to the project (almost 50K lines of code) which puts him #6 all time on the project.  He is also #7 in all time Pull Request submissions for the project.  He is a quiet, steadfast, never-a-complaint contributor that has championed many of the project’s advances such as device service and device profile simplifications, message bus communications from device services, device filtering, and future device service record and replay features.

 

Siggi Skulason (from Canonical) – updated and significantly improved the EdgeX CLI tool over the course of the last two release cycles.  Importantly, Siggi upgraded the tool from the V1 APIs to the V2 APIs, added support for all the service endpoints (versus a small subset selection of APIs), made the CLI available as a snap, removed a significant amount of technical debt, and improved the products help and documentation.  

 

I am happy to honor and call out these gentlemen for their efforts.  I don’t know of too many open-source projects that go to honor and thank its contributors with awards like this.  To be nominated and then selected by your peers – especially of the caliber of the EdgeX engineering community – is such a great recognition of their work.  Congratulations Bryon, Jim, Anthony, Marc, Emilo, Iain and Siggi.  Jobs well done.

You can view the Awards presentation here:

 

Thank You EdgeX

It’s been a productive few months – one release out, another planned and being worked on, and a time to shell out some well earned “kudos”.  Before I go, I want to let the community know  I am stepping aside from my role as TSC chair, and a new set of leaders are stepping up to take EdgeX into its future – and a bright future it has.

About a month after I joined Dell Technologies in 2015, I was handed the task of finding an IoT software platform to put on our new brand of gateways.  EdgeX began life on my kitchen island with an idea, an architecture and a small bit of code.  With the support of the company, some great leaders, and a collection of some of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with, my work was expanded on, productized and launched as the edge software you know today.  For the past seven years (almost to the day), EdgeX has been at the center of my professional working life (and my wife would probably add that it included much of my personal life).  Creating it, taking it into open source, working with the Linux Foundation to make it available and known, working at IOTech to commercialize the idea, and leading this wonderful community has been the highlight of my career.  It has allowed me to travel the world, meet so many amazing people, be a part of an incredible creative process, and watch something I started get used to create solutions that help people all over the globe.  EdgeX has exceeded even my wildest dreams.  It’s just hard to wrap my brain around it even today.  I am no Einstein.  But if you have an idea (even a moderately good idea), find some amazing people around you that can help turn the idea into reality, and you can catch lightning in a bottle.

I would need a separate blog post to thank everyone I owe for this experience and the success of EdgeX.  That is not an exaggeration.  “Thank you” is not enough but to the EdgeX community, people I worked with at Dell and those in my current home of IOTech Systems, I hope you take it as a small down payment for all I owe you.

I’ll close by suggesting that if anyone ever offers you the chance to work on, let alone start, an open-source project – jump at the opportunity.  You will be better for the experience.  I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill – many forms of software development have been tried and will be tried in this world.  No one pretends that open-source development is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that open-source development is the worst form of software development except for all other forms that have been tried.  

EdgeX – small at the edge, but forever big in my heart.

EdgeX Foundry Issues Bug Fix Release (v2.1.1) of its EdgeX Jakarta Release

By Blog, EdgeX Foundry
The EdgeX Foundry project, a highly-scalable and flexible open source framework that facilitates interoperability between devices and applications at the IoT edge, issued a bug fix release (version 2.1.1) of the EdgeX Jakarta release.  Importantly, as Jakarta is under long-term-support (LTS), this new bug fix release addresses a critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) issue.  Adopters using the Jakarta LTS release should upgrade immediately to this bug fix release.  The CVE is documented on the project’s GitHub site.  In addition, this bug fix release also addresses some less critical bugs that were identified and fixed through the Kamakura release cycle.  Details on what is in version 2.1.1 can be found on the project’s Wiki site.
All of the fixes in this Jakarta dot release are already available in the Kamakura release (the latest, but non-LTS, release from EdgeX).  Adopters of Kamakura do not need to make any changes as the CVE and other bug fixes are already part of the latest EdgeX release.