Equideum Health and Nokia Bell Labs Collaborate to Empower Individuals to Own and Benefit from Health Data Sourced from Edge Devices

• Equideum Health and Nokia Bell Labs are collaborating with a focus on integrating and leveraging edge datasets to be made available for clinical research purposes via the Equideum Exchange
• Includes development of a scalable and highly secure approach for privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning at the edge

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#edge–Today, Equideum Health (formerly ConsenSys Health), a ConsenSys partner and Mesh portfolio company creating Web3 person-centered healthcare and research networks, announced that it has entered into an applied research collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs focused on empowering individuals to own and benefit from their personal health-relevant data. The collaboration will specifically focus on the rapidly expanding datasets generated from wearable and other edge devices, such as smart watches, rings, earables, and the growing array of in-home medical devices.

Nokia Bell Labs, the renowned research organization of Nokia, has a nearly 100-year unrivalled track record of innovation, pioneering many foundational technologies that underpin modern information and communications networks and digital devices and systems. Its staff have been awarded nearly 200 national and international awards, including nine Nobel Prizes.

The first of two projects to be undertaken involve Nokia Bell Labs’ earable prototype, a smart device worn in the ear that utilizes signal processing and on-device machine learning to create a cognitive augmentation platform. The earable device will be, integrated as a representative edge device with the personal private clouds within Equideum Health’s forthcoming direct to consumer offering. The second project will be an implementation of a collaborative machine learning environment that can preserve the privacy of the user data and the AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) models during training and inference. This integration will increase the optionality of privacy models available within Equideum Health’s enterprise-facing Data Integrity and Learning Networks^TM (DILNs).

DILNs are specialized public/private hybrid blockchain and decentralized AI networks that support tokenization of datasets and compute results, weighted attribution of data contribution in federated learning, and privacy-preserving verifiable consent mechanisms for the analytical use of decentralized health data – where compute resources are brought to decentralized data instead of centralizing data processing.

This collaboration complements and extends the partnership recently established between Equideum Health and Nokia related to the launch of the Equideum Exchange. The Equideum Exchange will allow individuals to monetize their personal health data, as well as enable enterprise DILN members to participate in the new data economy.

The Equideum Exchange architecture includes the Nokia Data Marketplace (NDM) offering, delivered through its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. It is implemented uniquely within a public-permissioned Ethereum blockchain architecture to support self-sovereign identity, data, and advanced privacy preservation within an open, decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem specializing in health and health-relevant data as an asset class.

“We are excited by the enormous potential of our collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs. We aim to unlock, for scientific, clinical, and population health purposes, the exponentially growing health and health-relevant data produced by edge devices,” says Heather Leigh Flannery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Equideum Health. “Our industry has neither linked trusted and verifiable device identities to human identities, nor established the necessary end-to-end data transport cybersecurity from IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Our partnership will establish secure data pathways from the edge to Equideum Health’s decentralized consumer-sovereign infrastructures. From there, it can be safely and ethically utilized and monetized under the control of the data subject. Edge data is already too large to centralize within Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems; it is vital that we implement new frameworks to ensure its clinical utility and cybersecurity, while enabling the privacy, empowerment, and economic participation of the data subject.”

Thierry E. Klein, President of Bell Labs Solutions Research, Nokia Bell Labs, says: “We are constantly striving to accelerate and increase the impact of our research by applying and testing it in real-world scenarios. We are looking forward to our collaboration with Equideum Health to boost our work on device-based intelligence and privacy-preserving AI/ML exchanges that let enterprises and users share data and machine learning models without worrying about a loss of privacy. Equideum Health is a perfect partner for this endeavor – a disruptive company that shares our excitement about Web3 technologies that will unlock new value in the data generated by billions of sensors and devices. We expect that the data exchange Equideum Health is building for the health sector will be a blueprint for many other verticals, unlocking immense business value in the years to come.”

Equideum Health’s work with Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs, including the Equideum Exchange and promise of edge data integration, is the focus of an educational webinar “Making Health 3.0 at the Edge a Reality with Equideum Health and Nokia” on April 14, 2022, at 10am EDT/4pm CEST. Register here.

About Equideum Health

Equideum Health (formerly ConsenSys Health), a ConsenSys Mesh portfolio company and ConsenSys partner, builds Web3 person-centered healthcare and research networks called Data Integrity and Learning Networks (DILNs). DILNs feature self-sovereign identity, fine-grained verifiable consents, advanced privacy preservation and decentralized data liquidity across enterprise and individual data silos. DILNs are implementations of the company’s Elevated Compute^TM platform, powered by Ethereum, tokenization, decentralized artificial intelligence (AI), and confidential computing. Equideum Health’s DILNs prioritize populations with uniquely complex healthcare needs and aim to improve population health and clinical outcomes by impacting access, equity, quality, personalization, engagement and empowerment.

A founding member of the Decentralized Trials & Research Alliance (DTRA), Equideum Health is innovating in the field of privacy-preserving clinical trials matching, e-consent, and precision medicine applications. As an active participant in multiple Linux Foundation organizations, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and IEEE SA Open initiatives, Equideum Health is driving standards development and harmonization efforts necessary for the success of healthcare public-private partnerships in a Web3 world.

Learn more about our vision, offerings, and accomplishments at equideum.health.

About Nokia

At Nokia, we create technology that helps the world act together.

As a trusted partner for critical networks, we are committed to innovation and technology leadership across mobile, fixed and cloud networks. We create value with intellectual property and long-term research, led by the award-winning Nokia Bell Labs.

Adhering to the highest standards of integrity and security, we help build the capabilities needed for a more productive, sustainable and inclusive world.

Learn more about Nokia and Nokia Bell Labs.

Contacts

MEDIA:
Pete Harris

pete.harris@equideum.com
917.379.7287