This week we had Christopher Snider, one of whom is in charge of Tidepool, to give us a presentation centered on this public health open source project. Tidepool is a typical example of open source used in healthcare communities, and it is great to have a deeper insight into this field to understand some specific benefits of open source projects. At the same time, for the group contribution project, my team is continuing investigating in issues as well as working on previously found issues.

Insights into Healthcare Open Source Projects

During Christopher’s introduction about TIdepool Loop, what impressed me most is how this app help monitor users’ health condition in a free, convenient way. This is related to my personal experience. My grandpa was once concerned by his blood sugar level. He was always testing his blood sugar level. However, he didn’t have a standard way to keep track of those numbers. This caused him to be easily depressed or confused by a single test result. Therefore, when I learned that Tidepool Loop can do basic analysis on one’s data and visualize it in an easy-understand way, I believe it would be useful for users who are not very capable of keeping track of the big picture themselves.

By understanding Tidepool, we also gain some general knowledge into open source projects in healthcare communities. To me, the most essential philosophy here is that, making the project open source is not simply about benefiting the project, the app itself, but ultimately for spreading the technology to help more communities. In the article “How radical transparency is transforming open source healthcare software,” Christopher introduces that “An ethos of openness can go beyond making source code open. Tidepool’s employee handbook is available for others to use or even copy as a start for their own operations,” and, specifically “For example, groups across the world fork Tidepool’s code and spin up instances of the platform localized to regions in South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. The company has contributed to external projects and repositories through the course of its own development work while also benefiting from the work of open source contributors.” So I would say, on the one hand, making a healthcare project open source can help make the project itself more transparent, and benefit from contributions. On the other hand, the bigger impact is on the whole community across the world. It makes it a lot more easier for other people to enjoy similar technologies, as they can learn from this project.

Continued Group Work

This week, we continued to make contribution on automatic parameter validation and we had several PRs merged smoothly. We noticed an interesting new issue. It is about implementing some functions in scikit optimizer to sklearn and maintain them by contributors of sklearn. We have commented but it seems that sklearn maintainers are still discussing whether it is a good idea.

Therefore, we will closely look at this issue in case there are updates. At the same time, we will search for new issues regularly and do automatic parameter validations as we did before.