ManagementPortal : A management system of remote monitoring studies #
ManagementPortal (MP) is a component built by the RADAR-base community to manage remote monitoring studies of participants/patients. It facilitates the default security protocol followed in RADAR-base data workflow. It helps to manage studies, participants, data-sources and handles authentication and authorization of entities with the help of role based access control. It uses OAuth2 workflow to support authentication and authorization.
Concepts in ManagementPortal #
Management Portal is designed to support remote monitoring of subjects. RADAR-base follows a few terms and concepts across the platform which are defined below.
Project: A project refers to a study or a phase of a study/project. Project is an important instance and a compulsory to have to start data collection. Every user except SYSTEM_ADMIN is categorized based on a project. A user can be assigned to one or more projects. A project-name should be unique and essential to create a project. It can only be created by a SYSTEM_ADMIN.
Subject: A subject refers to a person or an object from whom/which the data is collected. A subject should be assigned to a project and uniquely identifiable. MP creates an unique identifier for every subject. Since the identifier provided by MP is in UUID format and less human-readable, MP allows to store a human readable identifier as additional metadata. While a study participant is the most obvious real-world counterpart of the subject, it is not limited to that use case. Subject can refer to anything in the environment you want to assign a set of sensors to e.g. a plant or a pet.
Source Type: As the name suggests, source type is the type or a category of a source, i.e. FitBit Charge 2, Empatica E4, a questionnaire, a glucometer etc. A source type is identified by the unique combination of producer, model and catalog-version. A catalog defines how data is collected from a source-type and it should be versioned. It provides additional flexibility for defining or customizing a source-type. E.g. catalog-version 1.0.0 of Empatica E4 can collect data from five sensors and catalog-version 2.0.0 can collect from six sensors. The source type identifier can be defined as follows e.g. considering Empatica E4 the producer is Empatica, model is Empatica E4, and catalog-version is 1.0.0. In MP a project can use one or more source types and should be entered accordingly in MP. E.g. for a depression study we could use FitBit 2, an application to collect phone sensor data and a questionnaire etc. Source type has a collection of source data.
Source Data: Source Data is the definition of data collected from a source type. E.g. Acceleration data from Empatica E4, application usage from a smartphone. A source data can be used in a source type and a source type can have multiple source data. Source data contains the metadata of how data is collected from a source e.g. type of the data, format, schema, topic where that data is sent to, unit, frequency etc.
Source: A Source is the object which produces the data, e.g. a device, an app. Similar to a subject, a source should be assigned to a project , uniquely identifiable and the identifier is generated by MP. A Source is an instance of a Source Type e.g. a particular device of FitBit or an instance of an application. A source can be dynamically created without user interaction by an application or manually entered by a user in MP based on the source type and the permissions that a user or an application have. A source-type must be created and used in the project where the source is expected to be used. E.g. the device A00017 of Empatica E4 can be used in a project which uses Empatica E4 as a source-type.
Currently, security architecture of the RADAR-base validations allows only a subject registered in Management Portal to send data from the source(s) assigned to him/her.
Security and Role Based Access Control. #
Management Portal(MP) makes use of the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) method and OAuth2 to provide security. Every user in Management Portal can have one or more role.
A role in MP is a combination of a project and an authority. An authority is a privilege that allows a user to perform certain actions in the platform e.g. a SYSTEM_ADMIN can create a project, a PROJECT_ADMIN can add subjects to the project he/she is assigned to and a PARTICIPANT can send data to the platform etc. A role defines the actions that a user is authorized to perform on which projects.
An authority has a set of permissions. A permission is the smallest definition of an action that can be performed on RADAR-base platform. E.g. creating a project, reading a project. An authority is formed by a collection of permissions according to the requirements. This allows clear separation of what can be done and what cannot be done by a particular user with a particular role.
