Thank you so much for joining us in San Francisco for the 2026 Open Healthware Week! We are so happy to have witnessed so many incredible talks, workshop collaborations, projects, and conversations among attendees. A huge thank you to all of our speakers, the venues Gray Area and Studio 45, and National Science Foundation (NSF) for the grant that allowed all of this to happen. You can watch all of the talks from both the Conference days on our YouTube channel and keep up with the entire Healthware program on the dedicated site. It was especially exciting to host the Certification workshop to launch the Open Healthware certification procedure!
Open Healthware certification workshop
During this workshop we had Healthware practitioners from around the world come together to go through the new process, developed specifically to consider the unique constraints in producing a health device. While our common certification process covers a lot of bases, it can be difficult to have the correct information for what it really means to open source a healthware project. After working with stakeholders cross the spectrum of health, it become clear that an even stronger focus on the source was necessary for Healthware. We’ve been working at this for the last two years in order to find out what we could do to properly support the making and sharing of Healthware projects. Through this we have been able to conduct numerous workshops, discussions and discussions around what it would mean to create an open source certification for a health device. Thank you to all the amazing community members who worked with us on developing it, we are so proud to officially have it up and running. You can explore this new certification process right here!
We are not trying to be a safety regulatory body in any way, simply provide a place to contain Open Healthware projects with a clear and well-documented source.
Certification workshop panel
After a talk and Q&A period with our panel who will be reviewing the Healthware certifications, our attendees began to submit the first Healthware certifications. Unlike our common certification process, Healthware involves a more thorough review which means it will take slightly longer for projects to appear in the database but we are extremely excited to have the first batch under review and soon to populate the project listings. We’ve also been hard at work releasing a variety of resources for the Healthware initiative including: Best Practices for Replicating Open Healthware Designs Best Practices for Contributing to Open Healthware Designs Best Practice for Source of Open Healtware Design Open Healthware Recommended Practices for Device Quality Thank you to Karlos Rene Ayala for all photos!
Open Healthware Conference team pic
