Meet Brian Bong Co-creator of Missi app, securing remote health monitoring data through IOTA
One of the objectives of IOTA is to enable data integrity within the health industry. By securely transmitting and storing individual medical records in the distributed IOTA ledger, access to private medical records can be reliable, secure and controlled.
Hence, within the IOTA community we can already find health-oriented PoCs, which try to resolve some of the difficulties this area regularly encounters using the technology offered by IOTA.
Behind one of these interesting projects is Brian Bong. Brian is deeply connected to projects related to the health area, he works from Malasya developing Remote health monitoring solution secured with IOTA that can help both doctors and health centers to improve the monitoring of their patients achieving a more efficient care.Let’s know a little more about him and this PoC, which we could be using in the near future.
Gabriela JaraContent Coordinator & WriterIOTA Hispano
Can you tell us a little about you and your background?
I am a hospital IT consultant with over 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry. I studied culinary art in Switzerland and computer science in the United States. Started my IT career as an ERP system analyst for hospital support services and later into managing Electronic Medical Records (EMR) project implementations. I have experience working with hospital planners, architects, engineers and medical equipment planners in design and build hospital projects.
I heard about bitcoin in 2014 but didn’t take it seriously until a friend came over in September 2017 to educate me and my business partner about cryptos. Since then we have been very excited about the future of crypts and started to pay a lot of attention to DLT.In November 2017, while studying the list of top cryptos, we discovered IOTA and immediately attracted by IOTA’s feeless and data plus currency architecture. To understand how IOTA works, we setup an IRI node the very next month. Six months later, after many trials and errors, we were convinced IOTA is the perfect fit for our project and decided to rebuild our health app on top of IOTA.
Was really excited about the no transaction fee part, which I initially thought IOTA Tangle would be a great storage option for electronic health record. Of course, we found out soon enough that DLT is not designed to store large amount of data for speedy retrieval. This led us to explore a hybrid model where IOTA supports implementation of Self-Sovereign ID (SSID) or digital ID and a standard database will be used to store the encrypted medical records, viewable only by the patients and their authorized care providers.
On the other hand, IOTA’s feeless approach raised concerns about incentives for node operators to continue running their nodes. This is however no longer a concern after we realized that businesses like us will maintain redundant nodes to ensure access to the tangle instead of depending solely on public nodes without guaranteed uptimes or access volumes.
I co-founded SmartOptz in 2014 to build internet bandwidth management appliances in addition to health IT consulting and project management services. In 2016, when internet bandwidth cost was dropping rapidly, our product became less relevant in the market, so we decided to pivot.
It was by chance that we came across bluetooth medical devices during a business trip to Shenzhen, China that we saw the potential of building health app for the Malaysian market and the region. At that time, bluetooth home care devices like blood pressure monitor and blood glucose monitors were not available in the local market.
In a country where 1 in 4 adults have diabetes and 1 in 3 adults having blood pressure problems, providing a vital sign home monitoring solution seems like a viable idea. To support this initiative, we also became a Bluetooth medical devices importer.
SmartOptz’s vision is to put medical record at patient’s fingertips. To accomplish this, we need to architect in such a way that it can provides data privacy and access control to the owner of the data – the patient.
To protect patient’s privacy, no patient info, e.g. name, ID, contact number and email address shall be captured and stored in the health portal. Data security is to be further enhanced by encrypting each individual medical record making it accessible only via the patient’s private key. This ensures patients’ total control over access to their medical records. Most importantly, SmartOptz does not have the master key by design to access any single medical record on the portal unless given consent by the patient.
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