Early detection of disease outbreaks is crucial and even small improvements in detection can significantly impact on a country’s public health. In this work, we investigate the use of a crowdsourcing application and a real-time disease outbreak surveillance system for five diseases; Influenza, Gastroenteritis, Upper Respiratory Tract Infection (URTI), Scabies and Conjunctivitis, that are closely monitored in Mauritius. We also analyze and correlate the collected data with past statistics. A crowdsourcing mobile application known as Disease Outbreak Tracker (DOT) was implemented and made public. A real-time disease surveillance system using the Early Aberration Reporting System algorithm (EARS) for analysis of the collected data was also implemented. The collected data were correlated to historical data for 2017. Data were successfully collected and plotted on a daily basis. The results show that a few cases of Flu and Scabies were reported in some districts. The EARS methods C1, C2 and C3 also depicted spikes above the set threshold on some days. The study covers data collected over a period of one month. Once symptoms data were collected using DOT, probabilistic methods were used to find the disease or diseases that the user was suffering from. The data were further processed to find the extent of the disease outbreak district-wise, per disease. These data were represented graphically for a rapid understanding of the situation in each district. Our findings concur with existing data for the same period for previous years showing that the crowdsourcing application can aid in the detection of disease outbreaks.
#1Martin Müller(EPFL: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)H-Index: 19
#2Marcel Salathé(EPFL: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)H-Index: 36
In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams. At the same time, many challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are updated, which means that there is limited reus...
The ever accelerating process of globalization enables more than half the population to live in cities. Thus, the air quality in cities exerts critical influence on the health status of more and more urban residents. In this article, based on urban air quality data collected through meteorological sites, mobile crowdsourcing, and IoT sensing, along with users' body signals, we propose an urban healthcare big data system named UH-BigDataSys. In this article, we first introduce a method of integra...
Influenza causes an estimated 3000 to 50,000 deaths per year in the United States of America (US). Timely and representative data can help local, state, and national public health officials monitor and respond to outbreaks of seasonal influenza. Data from cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) and crowd-sourced influenza surveillance systems have the potential to provide complementary, near real-time estimates of influenza activity. The objectives of this paper are to compare two novel infl...
Last. Christoph Neuberger(LMU: Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)H-Index: 19
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Abstract Since an ever-increasing part of the population makes use of social media in their day-to-day lives, social media data is being analysed in many different disciplines. The social media analytics process involves four distinct steps, data discovery, collection, preparation, and analysis. While there is a great deal of literature on the challenges and difficulties involving specific data analysis methods, there hardly exists research on the stages of data discovery, collection, and prepar...
Last. Wanchun Dou(NU: Nanjing University)H-Index: 33
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The world of industrial automation technology is at the outset of a new era of innovation with the hype of Industry 4.0. Global modern industrial system converges the power of machines, computing, analytics, connectivity, cyber-physical systems, Internet of things, automation, cloud system and data exchange. Industry 4.0 is a revolution towards the digital world of digital factories and smart products. Big data is an integration of multi-disciplinary technologies and facilitates customer by brin...
#1Jihye Choi(SNU: Seoul National University)H-Index: 2
#2Youngtae Cho(SNU: Seoul National University)H-Index: 13
Last. Hyekyung Woo(SNU: Seoul National University)H-Index: 6
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Background Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are a significant public health concern, and early detection and immediate response is crucial for disease control. These challenges have led to the need for new approaches and technologies to reinforce the capacity of traditional surveillance systems for detecting emerging infectious diseases. In the last few years, the availability of novel web-based data sources has contributed substantially to infectious disease surveillance. This study...
Last. Cheikh Sokhna(AMU: Aix-Marseille University)H-Index: 31
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Infectious diseases still represent a major challenge for humanity. In this context, their surveillance is critical. From 2010 to 2016, two Point-Of-Care (POC) laboratories have been successfully implemented in the rural Saloum region of Senegal. In parallel, a homemade syndromic surveillance system called EPIMIC was implemented to monitor infectious diseases using data produced by the POC laboratory of the Timone hospital in Marseille, France. The aim of this study is to describe the steps nece...
Online Social Networking sites have achieved a phenomenal growth over the last decade attracting much attention from researchers. Most of the major social media are predominated by the youth, exploiting it for one purpose or the other. A sample of 300 was collected from Secondary and Tertiary Institutes of Mauritius highlighting usage, purpose, time spent, impact and influence, level of trust and the future role of social media, this explorative study examines the impact of social networking sit...
Last. Joseph J. Gillard(Defence Science and Technology Laboratory)H-Index: 3
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In recent years social and news media have increasingly been used to explain patterns in disease activity and progression. Social media data, principally from the Twitter network, has been shown to correlate well with official disease case counts. This fact has been exploited to provide advance warning of outbreak detection, forecasting of disease levels and the ability to predict the likelihood of individuals developing symptoms. In this paper we introduce DEFENDER, a software system that integ...
: Nursing informatics (NI), as a specialty of nursing, can trace its origins back as far as the 1960s. While difficult to find empirical evidence to pinpoint exactly when NI moved from the fringes of nursing to more mainstream recognition, the late 1990s to early 2000s was a period of significant growth in the desire to leverage information technology as a means of collecting more robust and reliable healthcare information. This, in turn, has led to a significant increase in the number of nurses...
