Skip to main content

Chunara Rumi

HealthMap is a real-time disease epidemic intelligence tracking and visualization system that collects information from general news media, individual first-hand reports and public health sources around the world. Gaps in this effort clearly occur during times of crisis where traditional mechanisms may be dismantled. Clinical information gathered by deployed physicians can play a key role in providing early insight on emerging public health threats. We developed OutbreakMD to gather such information in real-time and combine with existing HealthMap informal and formal surveillance techniques. 

Objective

OutbreakMD is a mobile Web application that was piloted in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The application is designed for collecting, organizing and visualizing clinical information from individual patients to better monitor emerging infectious disease in disaster situations, in situations with limited public health infrastructure and unreliable Internet connectivity

Referenced File
Submitted by uysz on

A devastating cholera outbreak began in Haiti in 2010. Sequencing of Vibrio cholerae isolates showed that the epidemic was likely the result of the introduction of cholera from a distant geographic source. The same strain of cholera was detected in other countries within 100 days. The unique instigation and geographic spread of this epidemic highlight the need for improvements in timely global outbreak surveillance. Novel information sources have been shown to provide early information about public health events and disease epidemiology. Particularly, volume of Internet metrics such as web searches or micro-blogs have been shown to be a good corollary for public health events. In this study, we evaluate geographic trends in online social media following an infectious disease outbreak to determine whether this may enable prediction of secondary outbreak locations.

 

Objective

To evaluate the association between and develop a risk model relating geographic trends of social media and spread of an infectious disease outbreak.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The emergence of new influenza strains including H1N1, H5N1, H3N2v as well as other respiratory pathogens such as SARS, along with generally weak information about household and community transmission of influenza, enforce the need for augmented influenza surveillance. At the same time, Internet penetration and access has grown, with 82% of American adults using the Internet, enabling transfer and communication of information that can be collected and aggregated in near real-time. Surveillance targeted towards influenza in other countries, and towards malaria in India, has previously been executed with good user engagement. In this study, we created an online participatory influenza surveillance tool in the United States, called Flu Near You.

Objective

To develop a participatory system for monitoring the activity of influenza-like-illness among the United States general population.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

ARIs have epidemic and pandemic potential. Prediction of presence of ARIs from individual signs and symptoms in existing studies have been based on clinically-sourced data. Clinical data generally represents the most severe cases, and those from locations with access to healthcare institutions. Thus, the viral information that comes from clinical sampling is insufficient to either capture disease incidence in general populations or its predictability from symptoms. Participatory data — information that individuals today can produce on their own — enabled by the ubiquity of digital tools, can help fill this gap by providing self-reported data from the community. Internet-based participatory efforts such as Flu Near You have augmented existing ARI surveillance through early and widespread detection of outbreaks and public health trends.

Objective

To evaluate prediction of laboratory diagnosis of acute respiratory infection (ARI) from participatory data using machine learning models

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on
Subscribe to Chunara Rumi