Firefox OS/MedicalPlatformProject
Medical Platform Project
With the aging population worldwide, there has been a rapid increase in dependent patients who are either bed or house bound. 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.
In October 2015, we raised a suggestion and initialized this project in National Central University. The 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 apps, and who are not familiar with existed complicated mobile operating systems. It contains the following parts:
1. Wearable device.
2. Internet hub.
3. Data center.
Wearable devices stay with users and collect all information from other medical devices. An operating system with simple and friendly user interface to these target audience is expected in the wearable devices. We will also try to optimize Firefox OS to be able to retrieve monitoring data from 3rd party medical devices or other related IOT devices constantly. This wearable device can be also used to provide quick and easy to understand dashboard, to show the overview of health condition to users. It can be used as a communication channel between users and doctors. Therefore, it keeps sending information to data center for doctors to do diagnosis, and also allows doctors to send some suggestions to users.
In order to increase the battery life in the wearable devices, the concept to have internet hubs is generated. Internet hubs connect with wearable devices via bluetooth, and connect with data center via WiFi. It acts as the bridge to transfer data between wearable devices and the data center.
Data center collects all data from wearable devices and do further statistics and provide a web based management console for doctors to do diagnosis. It also provides console for users and their family members to keep connected and be aware of the health condition of the users.
With this project, we would like to bring more medical devices to the world of web, and provide a secure environment that shorten the distance between users and doctors.
How to join?
If you are interested in joining us,
- Please sign up your name here. Please input your name, email, skills, Bugzilla account, and your country/timezone, then we will know how we can work together.
- Please subscribe our mailing list: Google Group: fxos-medical-platform
- Please join our IRC channel: #fxos-medical-platform
Target working environment
Based on our discussion, the benefit to run this system on a wearable device is better than on a mobile phone. To ask elders to carry a mobile device might be not a good suggestion. Instead, a wearable device is better. So, wearable is considered as a long term plan. We need to survey what kinds of wearable device is suitable for this project.
Before we found a good wearable device, the original plan is to work on existed Firefox OS mobile phones for the 1st version of this project. Later, based on some further discussions, in order to prevent some existed bias assumption on mobile phones and increase the availability to community and allow community members to have the same development environment in the early stage, Raspberry Pi 2 is considered as a good choice for phase 1.
Then, as the emulator is becoming mature, a good plan is to work on emulator environment before we find a solution on wearable devices. In order to make sure Firefox OS emulator will be easy to access by community members, a FxOS emulator promotion program is created.
Therefore, we can plan this project into the following phases:
- PHASE 1: Raspberry Pi 2
- PHASE 2: Firefox OS Emulator
- PHASE 3: Wearable devices
Project plan
Based on the target working environment, we can have 3 phases for this project. In phase 1, the following actions are what we need to take next:
- To collect user scenarios, user stories, requirements.
- To prioritize requirements.
- To provide UI wire-frame.
- To enumerate engineering works on Bugzilla for phase 1.
- To estimate required efforts.
- To list down testing plan.
Now, we are collecting user scenarios, user stories and requirements. Please see our meta bug: Bug 1223309. All collected user stories are in Google Spreadsheet.
2016 London Work Week
We are targeting to have our first demo in 2016 London Work Week. This demo could come with Raspberry Pi as a prove of concept device. Other than Raspberry Pi, a basic set of features on data center or data server is expected as well.
2015 Orlando Work Week
At 9am on December 11th 2015, we hosted a session in Mozilla Orlando Work Week. In this session, we had an overview of this program, and talked about the user stories, and the next plan.
After Orlando Work Week, we plan to refine user stories based on all comments that we collected during the Orlando Work Week. Then, we will submit these user stories into Bugzilla.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please send it to fxos-medical-platform@googlegroups.com, or talk with us via any communication channels that we have for this program.
Bug list
35 Total; 0 Open (0%); 35 Resolved (100%); 0 Verified (0%);
Action items
A meta bug was submitted to Bugzilla: Bug 1223309
- To survey good options of wearable to run this system.
- To make sure data can be received and transferred via BLE on emulator.
- To implement a Firefox OS app to communicate with wearable electrocardiograph devices.
Members
Initially, there are totally 7 graduated school students, 1 PhD student and 1 3rd grade student who are led by Dr. Horng in the computer science department to work on this project. Dr. Horng, PhD., National Taiwan University, is a professor in National Central University now. His major research area is bioinformatics, and database.
Now, there are more and more community members, and students from computer science department and medical schools from different countries to join. These countries include Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mauritius, India, Germany, Bangladesh, Mexico, Spain and Netherlands. It indeed becomes a global program now.
All joined members are listed in a Google Spreadsheet.
Medical Consultant(s)
We invited Dr. Tan Jit Seng, who was a doctor in Singapore and now is a director at Lotus Eldercare Pte Ltd and providing elder health care service. Dr. Tan devotes himself in elder health care for years. He is dog-fooding Firefox OS and actively working on technical programming fields as well.
Dr. Tan is a medical consultant in this project and he is providing medical suggestions based on his experience in elder health care field.
Communication Channels
- We have weekly meeting happened at 2pm every Friday in National Central University(UTC+08:00).
- Meeting can be accessed via Vidyo client. Vidyo Room URL.
- Offline discussion are happening via Telegram.
- IRC:
- How to use IRC to get connected with others in the Mozilla projects
- Channels: #fxos-medical-platform, #b2g, #mozilla-taiwan
- Mailing list:
- dev-fxos, dev-gaia
- Google Group: fxos-medical-platform
- Mailing list address: fxos-medical-platform@googlegroups.com
Mentors from Mozilla
- Product management - Kevin Hu
- Project management - Wesly Huang
- Engineering - Greg Weng, Steve Chung
- Product marketing - Natasha Ma
- User experience - Mark Liang, Morpheus Chen