Open Source Summit Europe 2022

Consumer mobile devices were used for Digital Contact Tracing during COVID-19. This rapidly created innovations in Bluetooth Low Energy based messaging protocols and reliability, decentralised healthcare data analysis, and privacy and data sovereignty. These lessons are now being applied to the wider healthcare landscape. This session will focus on how the lessons learnt from COVID-19 open source software through the Linux Foundation Public Health projects, including Herald an opensource reliable messaging platform that started by supporting Bluetooth Low Energy, are currently being applied more broadly, and what is coming over the next 12-36 months. For hospitals, tracking hospital equipment and biopsies to reduce waste and improve patient outcomes is a primary focus. The technology is also being applied to assist with patient monitoring and safety. In-hospital navigation is also being trialed. A future innovation is replacing pagers in hospitals with a more reliable method providing greater patient context, and the ability to respond more quickly. For individual health, fully decentralised digital contact tracing with less privacy concerns than is currently possible is being worked on. Applying machine learning on wearables, and patient data privacy and consenting too.