An important problem in biosurveillance is the early detection and characterization of outdoor aerosol releases of B. anthracis. The Bayesian Aerosol Release Detector (BARD) is a system for simulating, detecting and characterizing such releases. BARD integrates the analysis of medical surveillance data and meteorological data. The existing version of BARD does not account for the fact that many people might be exposed at a location other than their residence due to mobility. Incorporation of a mobility model in biosurveillance has been investigated by several other researchers. In this paper, we describe a refined version of the BARD simulation algorithm which incorporates a model of work-related mobility and report the results of an experiment to measure the effect of this refinement.
Objective
To refine the simulation algorithm used in the BARD so that it takes into account the work-related mobility and to compare the refined simulator with the existing one.