Lines / Blockchain Traceability of medical devices

In order to avoid importing medical equipment labeled as compliant in the EU but which is actually not. We want to design a blockchain system for traceability of the production of medical equipment.

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Inspiration

As we were spending our days of quarantaine in Spain, we were seeing the raw reality of the virus very close to us. This, together with the amount of time at home boosted our motivation to find for ideas which could improve the situation in Europe.

It was especially shocking for us to see how governments and major agents in Europe's economy were buying massive amounts of medical equipment without getting any guarantees about the products. Indeed, it was discovered that in several cases, medical equipment sold and labeled as conforming to the European standards outside of the EU, were not complying with the requirements supposed to cover. As a result, all this equipment cannot be used in Europe.

Millions and millions of euros are being paid in advance to desperately get equipment instantly from countries outside the EU. Of course, EU agents want to pay this money for equipment they can use immidiately to combat the virus. However , when the products arrive to Europe and are tested, many lots and purchases do not precise with the needed filters or materials for their correct manufacturing.

The use of valid medical devices which comply with the standards is absolutely essential for the European countries. Indeed, most of these medical devices are protecting the sanitary personnel. Without a good protection, the health system would collapse and countries will be unprotected while fighting the virus.

One of the most notable scandals in Europe is the case of Finland. The 8th of April, the health ministry confirmed that the pruchase of 2 million surgical masks and 230,000 other face masks (worth 10 million euros) was found not to conform to the EU standards.

We think that a system which confirms that the quality of the products before their purchase is necessary. This way, we would be sure that whatever we buy ,certified with this system, will be ready to use in Europe with no risk.

What it does

In order to solve this problem, we created a working Blockchain application, which is used by manufacturers and distributors to upload all the processes that a medical product has come through. Finally, this information is available for companies or governments registered in the network.

Thanks to this blockchain system we can ensure that the information uploaded is reliable and safe in order to have full trust between sellers and buyers. So intermediaries and end buyers can be sure at any time about the information of the product bought.

This blockchain system could be implementable in production chains outside the EU and could become a guarantee measure needed for companies to import their medical products to the EU.

We invite you to try our prototype app here -- https://github.com/aleaj/blockvirus

How I built it

Our philosophy from the beginning has been reuse and merge applications already made and base our development onto the traceability problem in the previous research of solutions developed before. For that reason, we chose the IBM code for a decentralized blockchain based network and with some make up and a new, astonishing html interface, create our own network.

Our network is composed by nodes that can easily upload information of a step in the manufacture process of the product with a block. This block is mined to the server(s) and appended to the chain. Code is supposed to be implemented with many servers distributed all along the globe if necessary, which makes the network more secure. If not, a single server could be used too.

For assuring the traceability of the product, we had two options: insert in each block information either of the following or the previous steps in the production chain. We discussed for some time and realized that the latter is more efficient and preserves the privacy of our clients. Because the whole relationship tree between factories, Laboratories and distributors cannot be reconstructed as a whole from the information of the block that arrives at the end of the track, the one is given to the customers (buyers).

After setting up the net with our own specific parameters, related to medical products and supplies (i.e. facemasks raw materials transformation, parts assembly,etc.), we challenged the problem of consulting. In order to consult the information about a product, the buyer can demand the QR-code assigned to it. By scanning it, our app will show him the whole list of blocks that interveined in the manufacture of that certain product.

We coded on our own a function that walks through the chain choosing the blocks and ordering them by timestamp. It was not easy for us to decide how the information was going to be put into the blocks so that later we could access to it easily and without losses but needing the less information possible.

It is possible for you to try our system if you download the directory from our GitHub repository noted below in this page. Next step would be the implementation of QR-codes reading and writing, login credentials and a friendly mobile accesible interface but for the reccord, now our server would be fully operative.

Challenges I ran into

The first thing we were confronted with was about defining the idea itself. We had it clear in our minds that we wanted to do something dealing with the traceability of medical devices. However, it was hard for us to find the best system possible that did what we were looking for. Then, the main challenge while coding was to make an algorithm which could consult the blocks of the chain. Indeed, for consultation of the end lot code, we need to go back in the chain and see the track of this code until the genesis block. Later, after the whole architecture was correctly set up a User Interface and decide how it would look for users and stakeholders. This was a challenge since we were new to Flask, the python module we used for serving and deploying the application and the nodes.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is to have a fully functional application running. This took a lot of time for most of the members of the team. It has been very satisfactory for us to see the app run correctly and be able to solve the problem we spotted at first.

What I learned

We have learned a lot a about Blockchain architecture and these kind of networks. We have learned about servers and HTML editing. We have learned about the way manufacturing of medical devices work. We have learned to work remotely and in a multidisciplinary way.

What's next for Lines

Blockvirus team needs to know more about current legislation on medical devices in order to be able to implement this system in the real world. The Blockchain network we have created works perfectly in our local computers, however, there is a big step from here to implementing it at a global scale. We need a lot of advice and knowledge about servers,network protocols etc.. We would like to get some visibility in this hackathon so the EU can get to know about our idea.

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Updates

posted an update —

Hi everyone, Our code is almost ready to go, with state-of-the-art blockchain algorithms we will be able to provide customers the traceability of any medical device (i.e. facemasks, respirators) from the beginning of their manufacturing process to the buy from any EU government, medical organisation, Enterprise. It would be very useful to have people in our team with knowledge in laws, market, analytics, security to create a system aware of the real world problems and could backup the privacy of our clients.

Please, if you are interested in our Project and want to help us with it and form part of our group let us know commenting below.

Thanks,

Alex.

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