HealthNet: Rebuilding Trust in Open Medical Innovation

The Vision: An Ecosystem for Open Healthcare Some of the world's most urgent health needs go unmet, not because solutions are impossible, but because they are unprofitable. Rare diseases, affordable therapies, and do-it-yourself (DIY) medical devices rarely attract the investment of large manufacturers. HealthNet is a project designed to change that.

Young cystic fibrosis patient at Sainte Justine Hospital using the PEP Master device.

HealthNet is a new model for creating, verifying, and sharing open source medical devices and software. It brings together developers, researchers, medical professionals, and patients into a single collaborative ecosystem, one where high-quality, life-improving solutions can be built in the open and trusted by everyone who depends on them. Our goal is to prove that healthcare innovation can be transparent, collaborative, and accessible to all, without sacrificing safety or quality.

The Core Concept: Trust Without Gatekeepers

Traditional medicine builds trust through a closed, accredited supply chain: a small number of certified companies design, manufacture, and distribute devices under strict regulatory oversight. This system works, but it leaves out the many valuable solutions that emerge from open communities and local makers.

HealthNet asks a simple question: How do we rebuild trust in a distributed system of production, as a genuine alternative to the traditional supply chain? The answer is a chain of trust that follows an open source design from its first sketch to certified clinical use. Every contribution, every improvement, and every validation is recorded transparently, so that a device designed by a global network of volunteers and fabricated by local makers can earn the same confidence as one produced by a traditional manufacturer.

The First Use Case: PEP Master

HealthNet grows out of a real-world initiative called PEP Master, an open venture nurtured within the Sensorica network, in collaboration with the Breathing Games network. PEP Master develops an affordable, DIY therapy instrument, a computer game paired with a hardware controller, that helps children living with cystic fibrosis practice positive expiratory pressure (PEP) physiotherapy.

Because cystic fibrosis affects a relatively small number of people worldwide, the private sector has little incentive to invest in dedicated tools. PEP Master, developed with partners including Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal and Breathing Games, shows how an open, community-driven approach can serve patients that the market overlooks. It is HealthNet's first proof that decentralized innovation can deliver tangible, trustworthy healthcare solutions.

The Participants: A Collaborative Community

HealthNet brings together everyone who plays a role in the life of an open medical solution:

• Developers & Designers: The open source software and hardware creators who bring new devices to life. HealthNet lets them catalog their creations, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and be recognized and rewarded for their contributions.

• Researchers & Academic Institutions: University labs and clinical teams (such as Sainte-Justine Hospital and Western University) who scientifically evaluate designs, validate safety and efficacy, and mature solutions to the standards patients deserve.

• Medical Professionals: Doctors and healthcare workers who can confidently recommend open source solutions, backed by peer-reviewed evidence and a transparent record of provenance.

• Patients: The people at the heart of it all, who gain access to affordable, effective therapies and can trust the devices they rely on every day.

• Partners & Stewards: The wider network of collaborators, non-profits, technology-transfer intermediaries, and regulators (like Health Canada) that help open solutions cross the bridge from community project to certified care.

The Journey of a Medical Innovation

HealthNet provides the tools to guide an open medical solution through its entire life, without a central authority owning the process:

1. Creating an Open Design: A developer registers a device or software design, defining how it may be used, shared, and improved. This "digital twin" becomes the permanent anchor for the solution's identity and history.

2. Cataloging and Discovery: Contributors and communities can find existing designs, understand their provenance, and build on proven work, reducing wasteful duplication and competition.

3. Fork, Remix, and Improve: Like collaborative software tools, HealthNet lets developers safely fork and remix existing creations while preserving a clear lineage. Every improvement is traceable back to what came before, so credit and provenance are never lost.

4. Scientific Validation: A feedback loop connects designers with academic labs, maturing each solution to the required level of safety. When a design meets the standard, its validation is published in peer-reviewed journals, anchoring trust in independent evidence.

5. A Path to Certification: With a transparent record of quality, safety, and provenance in hand, HealthNet supports the journey toward regulatory approval, offering institutions like Health Canada a new, credible pathway for solutions built outside the traditional supply chain.

6. Fair Rewards and Sustainability: Every meaningful contribution, design, validation, or refinement, is recognized. HealthNet's Trust Economy ensures developers can earn a fair return for their work, sustaining the ecosystem over the long term.

Why HealthNet Matters

For developers, it means recognition, protection for their open work, and a sustainable way to be rewarded for building solutions that matter.

For patients and communities, it means access to affordable, trustworthy medical devices, especially for conditions the market ignores.

For the healthcare system, it means a proven, replicable model for trusting distributed innovation, opening the door to solutions that would otherwise never reach the people who need them.

HealthNet is more than a platform; it is a new way to build, verify, and share the medical innovations that improve and save lives.

Powered by Nondominium: The Foundation of Trust

HealthNet is built on the Nondominium protocol, a specialized infrastructure designed for sharing and governing resources without centralized ownership. Nondominium provides the underlying building blocks that make HealthNet's chain of trust possible:

• Nondominium Objects (NDOs): Every device design and piece of software is represented as an NDO, a permanent "digital twin" that lives on a distributed network. Its identity and full history cannot be deleted or quietly rewritten by any single operator, ensuring provenance is preserved from first draft to certified use.

• Embedded Governance: The rules that keep a design safe and open, quality standards, licensing that prevents it from being privately enclosed, and conditions for who may modify it, are baked directly into the NDO. This is what guarantees an open source solution stays open and trustworthy as it travels through the network.

• Version Tracking with Provenance: Nondominium links related designs together (as components, derivations, or successors), so that forking and remixing never severs the trail of authorship. This gives HealthNet the "Git-like" collaboration it needs while maintaining a rigorous record of lineage.

• Private Participation Receipts (PPRs): Every contribution, whether writing code, validating a device, or refining a design, generates a bilateral receipt of that "act of contribution." Stored privately by each participant, these receipts build a verifiable reputation and form the basis of HealthNet's Trust Economy, ensuring recognition and fair rewards.

• Agent-Centric Infrastructure: Every participant, developer, researcher, clinician, or patient, is a first-class "agent" who owns their own data, with no central server in the middle. This makes the HealthNet community sovereign, resilient, and private by design, well-suited to the sensitivity of the medical field.

Related past post: Sensorica and health care

Attribution

• Currently, Nondominium is developed mainly by Sacha and Tibi at the Sensorica lab, taking into consideration the synthesis of 15 years of OVN development and practice within the Sensorica network, encapsulated in the OVN wiki. 
• This post was drafted using previous publications and polished with the help of AI. 

         You can monitor development of Nondominium and HealthNet closely and even influence it by investing in this endeavor. Find the Finance button here.

Sensorica and healthcare

There is a growing recognition about the negative effects stemming from commodifying innovation through restrictive I.P. protection and exclusivity, especially in the medical field. Open Source Development methodologies in software emerged as the dominant form of collaborative innovation in the late 90’s and the trend has been spreading to a wider sphere of work. The IT infrastructure of today’s world enables peers to connect, share and collaborate on solving common issues through use of collective knowledge. Commons-based peer production is the term that defines such collaborative efforts by peers. The collaborators act as the stewards of commonly held wealth and assets which could be anything ; monies, knowledge, equipment, reputations, social capital etc.The beauty of such networks is that development for one project can be mixed and remixed to suit a variety of other needs. Traditionally, such endeavors have been part of a gift-economy where peers do not seek tangible rewards for their contributions. However, for larger scale and mainstream economic model, gift economy is not a viable method for development. The question, then, is how do we keep track of contributions to inform fair rewards?

That is where the Open Value Network model (OVN) comes in. An OVN is built around a core open source community, preserving its nature, and adds layers of governance, infrastructure and methodologies in order to make large scale, open innovation networks as predictable and accountable as traditional organizations, such as coops or limited liability corporations. In an OVN, contributions to a process, be it tangible items such as time and money or intangibles such as social capital, are recorded and whatever benefit is derived from this process is proportionally divided and distributed back to contributors. This makes open networks sustainable, by allowing the implementation of capturing and redistribution mechanisms. Networks have yet to gain public recognition, legitimacy and legality, but the jury is out already, the OVN model makes open networks fully capable socioeconomic agents.

Sensorica is the first instantiation of the OVN model. It originated in Montreal, in early 2011. The initial focus of the network was to develop open source scientific research equipment using commons-based peer production methodologies. Indeed, most of activities are coordinated from the Sensorica Montreal lab, a physical location where local affiliates can meet and work together. However, the Network Resource Planning (NRP) tools that Sensoricans have developed lays the foundation of a strong decentralized community without geographical borders. It allows tracking of the flow of resources through the entire system, at both micro and macro levels. NRP is the mainstay of all Sensorica projects, and enables Sensorica to practically implement the ideologies of collaborative and open innovation in a transparent and equitable manner.

The video bellow explains the idea in detail.



The wellness of societies and communities also depend on the innovation of its peers. Over the past few decades, the care aspect of communities has also been commodified. Healthcare and education, the basics of human needs, have slowly been removed from the sphere of communities and instead, been handed over to closed and elitist institutions, including companies for profit-maximization. The result is a disjointed system where even these basic necessities are the purvey of the well-off. Moreover, in healthcare the quest for new cures and treatments is a quest for profits, and resources are mainly deployed in research and development (R&D) that promises good returns on investments. The illnesses of a few are forgotten. Just like with technological innovation, we, as a society, need to free knowledge and break down barriers to participation. For that to happen, Open Science will play a big part, meeting the requirement of creating open source scientific equipment and research methodologies that enable peers to do R&D on issues most important to them.


Sensorica's position on Open Science



See more on Open Science on Sensorica's website.

Guy Rouleau, the director of McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) announced recently in the Science Magazine that his institute was going to steer towards Open Science.

“We think that it is a way to accelerate discovery and the application of neuroscience.” (…) “There is a fair amount of patenting by people at the institute, but the outcomes have not been very useful” (...) “It comes down to what is the reason for our existence? It’s to accelerate science, not to make money.”

Sensorica has already taken concrete steps towards implementing this vision. One of the first projects undertaken by Sensoricans was the Mosquito, a force-transducer with ability to detect micron-scale movements, designed for applications in biomechanics at the cellular level. Today, Sensorica has over 15 projects for open source scientific instruments in different stages of development, some of them being used in University labs (see the full list). However, the main potential lies in the ability of the community to build upon these and many other devices and repurpose them to fit needs in diverse fields.


Sensorica's Mosquito system - by photo Daniel Brastaviceanu

Open source scientific instruments cost only of a small fraction to produce and to maintain, compared to their proprietary equivalents. This reduces the costs of innovation and widens participation in research. Professor Joshua Pearce from Michigan Tech University, and contributor to the Sensorica OVN mentions in one of his papers:

A case study of a syringe pump with numerous scientific and medical applications is presented. The results found millions of dollars of economic value from a relatively simple scientific device being released under open-licenses representing orders of magnitude in-crease in value from conventional proprietary development. The inescapable conclusion of this study is that FOSH development should be funded by organizations interested in maximizing re-turn on public investments particularly in technologies associated with science, medicine and education.

During its six years in development, Sensorica has prototyped formal relations with Universities and medical centers, demonstrating how the crowd and the institutional academia can successfully interface, opening wide and filtering participation in medical research, allowing discovery to go towards what matters to people, not just to Wall Street. The Mosquito sensor has been developed in collaboration with the Montreal Heart Institute and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, the Manipulators have been developed in partnership with McGill University. Numerous students have done their internship within the Sensorica lab, not only practicing their technical skills, but also learning how to operate in a network-type, highly collaborative environment. See Sensorica Interns webpage.

--> Lower cost open source scientific instruments lower the barrier to entry to medical research.
--> Interfacing institutional academia with open networks frees research topics from the narrow profit motive and speeds up innovation

In early 2015, Sensorica partnered with Breathing Games to produce an open source therapeutic device for kids suffering from cystic fibrosis. But this project is very different. As we are designing the hardware device, we are also thinking about how the data generated from its use during therapy sessions will be managed. It turns out that the blockchain technology can truly revolutionize how therapy and medical care are administered, and how the medical data is managed, and Sensorica has already embarked in blockchain applications development.

--> blockchain and other p2p technologies create the possibility of new healthcare services

The vision for Sensorica is to demonstrate the economic viability and practical superiority of open innovation. Since innovation has been segregated from community for the better part of the last century, the possibilities of applications are endless. We are not claiming to have the solution all the problems that our healthcare system is facing, but our past experiences have allowed us to peer into a new realm of solutions, enabled by the new digital technology and the new socioeconomic processes it has made possible.

There is a lot of criticism for commons-based peer processes pertaining to their ability to deliver large scale solutions, while being self-sustainable. In other words, the conclusions point to the persistent need of traditional forms of organizing innovation, production and distribution, in order to fuel these new processes: one needs to have a paid job to contribute to open source development. The flaw in these arguments is that they analyse these new practices within the traditional capitalist paradigm. Commons-based peer processes are part of a new socioeconomic paradigm, which prescribes its own underlying theory of value and its own capturing and redistribution mechanisms. Saying that open innovation is unsustainable is factually false, even within the capitalist regime. Arduino, for example, is a very successful commercial operation relying entirely on open source hardware and software technology. Most successful 3D printing and personal drone commercial operations also rely on open source, as well as operations that provide blockchain applications. All these new and disruptive technologies are dominated by these new types of ventures who know how to steward open networks. Something is going on here, for those who have eyes to see. And all these organizations are only hybrids, in the sense that their structure have capturing mechanisms that function in a market-driven economy, while relying on commons-based peer processes for innovation. Sensorica has data that shows, perhaps for the first time, how capturing mechanisms that are fully compatible with the logic of the p2p economy can be gradually introduced within this transitory economy, to become dominant in a very near future.

We do not have experience in pharmaceuticals. We cannot prescribe today a method through commons-based peer production to deliver a new drug, going through all the norms and regulations. The monetary costs associated with this type of ventures are huge, and if we transpose the challenge in an OVN setting it would require the deployment of an amount of resources and a complexity that we cannot sustain, at this point in time. But we do not see a hard barrier... As these systems scale, one day they will be capable of undertaking such challenges. Alternatively, we do have extensive experience with scientific instruments and less costly, and less regulated therapeutic devices. This is the path of least resistance for OVNs to infiltrate the care domain and gain strength. Joshua Pearce's conclusions show that once open source-based scientific instruments enter a market niche it totally disrupts it, putting traditional companies out of business, as they cannot sustain their operations at such low product prices. This trend is starting now with medical devices, like this 30$ DIY EpiPen example. Operating at lower prices, the monetary rewards an organization gets for the product, doesn't mean that we are going towards poverty. The zero marginal cost tendency, driven by open innovation, only makes sense in the capitalist paradigm. These new organizations pull other benefits from non-market-based sources, which are forbidden to traditional for-profit enterprises. We need a different type of accounting in order to determine the wealth of network-type organizations, one that goes beyond monetary currency, because innovation, production and rewards are more and more driven and organized by new types of currencies, by new types of symbolic systems, by current-sees [a concept proposed by Arth Brook].


Written by Abran Khalid and Tiberius Brastaviceanu.

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The text has been remixed from a post for a book made by Tibi. Please see here for the original text.