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Kevin Hu edited this page Sep 6, 2016 · 10 revisions

OpenIoMeT

OpenIoMeT stands for Open Internet of Medical Things. This page provides an overview for this open source project.

Background

With the aging population worldwide, there has been a rapid increase of dependent patients who are either bed or house bound. More and more services are provided by hospitals and health-care organizations and allow doctors to provide diagnosis in patients' places in a regular basis. But the frequency is not high enough to provide timely diagnosis based on latest update of health condition. It brings us the idea to implement a cloud based system that can monitor health condition of users and allows doctors to provide timely diagnosis. Although there are lots of medical mobile apps on the shelf to provide personal medical information, analysis, or even some simple monitoring functionalities, these applications are used on current complicated operating systems that most aging patients may have difficulties to use. Another bigger issue is the lack of a centralized system to collect all these data from different medical devices and send these data to doctors as one single source of data for further diagnosis. Therefore, the major goals of this project include:

  1. To provide a centralized place to collect data from different medical devices or apps automatically.
  2. To monitor health condition of users and allows doctors to provide timely diagnosis. The initial target audience for this project focuses on the patients / users who are unable to go to hospitals and see doctors, and who would like to have a centralized place for all medical data.

Problem Statements

  1. For elders, whether sick or not, to keep monitoring their health condition either by themselves, or by families or by their primary doctors is important. Those elders do not necessarily want to go to hospital very often but they still want to get medical advices or attention when they need/want to. A secured system that is able to provide an easy communication between patients, their family members, and doctors is therefore required.
  2. Current remote medical service systems out there already solve the problems of collecting data from devices, patients and then sending to doctors, but they are either segregated or owned separately by doctors/hospitals. Patients do not own their historical medical/clinical data.
  3. This Open Source project, Eir, means to solve this problem. All the data collected from each web-enabled devices are accessible to patients. Patients can decide whom the data should be sent to.

Value Proposition

Eir connects the linkage among doctors/hospitals, patients & the web-enabled medical devices. With patients being the focal who keep updating medical information from devices to data center, doctors can easily provide Remote Medical Service to patients, whereas patients have permanent access to their medical information.

Market Size and Ecosystem

According to a June 2015 study from McKinsey & Company, the economic effect from cloud connected health technology could range between $170 billion to $1.1 trillion a year in the next 10 years. It explains the significant impact from solutions like Eir.

In the ecosystem, roles include users/patients/family members, hospitals/doctors/health-care organizations, research institutes, medical device manufacturers, insurance industry, and pharma industry. When it comes to cost savings, the insurance industry stands to benefit the most. Insurers will continue to push the technology innovations that reduce the amount of money they pay in claims, totaled more than $250 billion in 2015, according to the US Treasury Department. Innovations like these are of vital importance to $1 trillion pharma industry. The reason is easy to be understood: The sooner the doctors can detect illness, the sooner patients can start taking the drugs they need to manage or cure their conditions.

We won't host servers to keep data from patients. Instead, we initialize this project, works with community, and provide a total solution to anyone who is legally authorized to host the servers. Our mission is to bring more devices into the world of web, and allow patients to get timely diagnosis from doctors via web technology.

Join Us!

If you are interested in this project, join us! Please sign up your name here. Please input your name, email, skills, and your country/timezone, then we will know how we can work together. Also, please subscribe our mailing list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-iomet

We also have gitter chat room here: https://gitter.im/orgs/OpenIoMeT/rooms. You may get quick answers from the gitter room.

Regular Meetings

We are going to have our regular meetings happen at 5pm(GMT+8) every Friday. The meeting channel is in the Skype Group. . Welcome to join us!