Hub spotlight: MyData Taiwan – moving from theory to practice with award-winning personal health app
MyData Global supports 30 regional hubs based around the world implementing the MyData Declaration. In turn, hubs help grow the global MyData movement by hosting events and carrying out activities such as lobbying governments and companies to be more ethical in their approach to personal data management.
MyData Taiwan was established in January 2020 and has been busy building a movement through events, working with leading academics and governments, and developing a personal data health app. MyData Taiwan saw the outbreak of Covid-19 as an opportunity to change how personal data and health information is handled in Taiwan and it took a practical approach to integrating MyData principles by developing an app called MyLog/LogBoard.
MyLog/LogBoard pulls together health information on temperature, sleep, heart rate and more into a single place that can be shared with doctors and medical staff. Users can log their Covid symptoms, thereby allowing them and medical staff to get a holistic picture of their health while strengthening the national response to Covid-19. Data is held on mobile devices and not in the cloud and can be shared with a one-off URL that wipes all data after 72 hours. The interface was co-developed with medical staff from Taiwan University and is fully compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The app is available on all major platforms and represents a significant step in giving users control over their health data, as well as providing strong privacy protection. The next step is to develop the app to include non-communicable diseases, such as heart failure and diabetes, with the department of pharmacy at Taiwan University.
Chi-Chuan Wang, Associate Professor at the School of Pharmacy at National Taiwan University, who advised on the app’s development, said: “From a health care perspective, MyLog/LogBoard helps us to move a step closer to individual-centered care with strong privacy protection. Portable records facilitate care as all the records can be carried by patients and easily read by healthcare professionals across different settings. With blockchain technique, MyLog/LogBoard ensures the integrity and incorruptibility of personal health records, which makes MyLog/LogBoard data a trustworthy source.”
Caption: The MyData Taiwan team with Audrey Tang, Digital Minister of Taiwan (centre back) at an Award event.
MyLog/LogBoard won third place at the Taiwan Techstars Startup Weekend Competition and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hack for Good and received an award at a “cohack” hackathon event organised by the Taiwan government and American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). As a result, MyData Taiwan was invited to present the app at a meeting with the National Health Insurance Administration, a government body. Members of MyData Taiwan were also invited to join the personal data governance committee of the Taipei city government and to review policies on student health data in elementary and junior high schools. MyData Taiwan’s work on personal data in a health context has resulted in the government of Taiwan’s interest in developing their own app based on MyLog/LogBoard – drawing on the open source code available on https://github.com/MyDataTaiwan.
Outside of Taiwan, MyLog/LogBoard has been rebranded as LifeBox and is available on iOS and Android. Stay up to date with MyData Taiwan via their twitter feed and website.
