Mark Woodbridge: Squaring the Circle – The Engineering Principles behind Minder
Channel: Society of Research Software Engineering
Date: 01/12/2022

Full title: Squaring the Circle: The engineering principles behind Minder - a healthcare platform designed for patients, carers, clinicians, researchers and developers.

Details: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/3101/submission/78
Slides: https://d3ijlhudpq9yjw.cloudfront.net/42ffed3c-0334-4d3b-b3a9-e3b1709a4381.pdf
Minder: https://mindermeetingplace.com

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Additional Q&A:

Q: Do you have a separate ops team to support development or is it all done by developers themselves? Do you use terraform for declarative infrastructure?
A: All ops are done by the (small!) development team. The team all are software developers but there is some individual specialisation on the dev–ops spectrum.

Q: Are you using any explainability tools on your model?
A: We have a variety of models. The one I mentioned in the talk has been subject to relevant methods during development (e.g. SHAP) but we do not currently provide explanations alongside its predictions when running in production.

Q: Do you have any concerns around civil liberties with this kind of smart home monitoring?
A: I certainly would if deployed at scale without suitable safeguards. Obviously all the participants enrolled in our study have provided informed consent, with the protocols subject to ethical approval at the outset and with ongoing review by clinicians. Our intention is only to improve the quality of care that they (and ultimately other people with relevant conditions) receive – and we want to only collect enough data to make that reality. Personally, I would want to know about the intended use of any data gathered about me, and, especially, how the data might ultimately be distributed. And as an RSE I wouldn’t want to work on a project that wasn’t aligned with these general concerns.

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Abstract: Minder is a digital platform developed by the UK Dementia Research Institute Care Research & Technology Centre to support people living with dementia. It is a collection of technologies that enables remote monitoring of people affected by dementia in their own homes by a clinical team. The aim is to promote independence, to improve the general health and well-being of people with dementia and their carers, and ultimately to allow people with dementia to remain living in their own homes for longer.

The platform is designed to automate data aggregation, analysis and alerting while preserving privacy and securely enabling oversight and intervention by medical practitioners. It also presents anonymised datasets to researchers for the identification of digital biomarkers of disease, typically via machine learning approaches, which can then be used to iteratively improve patient care.

Minder is a bespoke system composed of a large number of components and employing a broad range of contemporary technologies. This talk will describe the software architecture, engineering and deployment approaches that we have adopted to ensure its scalability and reliability. It will then focus on how how we have tried to balance the requirements of the diverse end-users of the platform, from people living with dementia to data scientists, and some lessons learnt about Research Software Engineering - particularly in relation to its use in a regulated domain.

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0:00 Speaker introduction
0:20 Talk
21:24 Q&A