August 3, 2008 at 9:31 am · Filed under bioinformatics, host-parasite, maps, public health
HealthMap
A project called HealthMap (http://www.healthmap.org) makes epidemiological information available to all corners of the world via the web. As reported in the July issue of PLoS Medicine, it extracts, categorizes, filters and integrates a variety of Web-based data sources, even analyzing blogs, listservs, chatrooms, and online news reports as sources for monitoring global health.
The idea is that people’s discussion can serve as signals of disease outbreaks which can then be scraped and fed to a map…
Brownstein JS, Freifeld CC, Reis BY, Mandl KD (2008) Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project. PLoS Med 5(7): e151 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050151
May 26, 2008 at 6:03 pm · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, ecoregionalism, making it public, public health
This is an interesting report I came across from a UN-Vodaphone partnership designed to provide “research and recommendations on how to use technology and telecom tools to effectively address some of the world’s toughest challenges” (found via THDblog)
The story I was most interested in was Case Study 10: Environmental Monitoring with Mobile Phones (Ghana) carried out by Intel Research. I was struck by this paragraph, detailing the convergence of locative sensing and personal health status:
Another area for further exploration is the ability of mobile sensing to contribute to public health by linking health with environmental factors that have not been available before. For example, even though we know that there is a link between asthma symptoms and air pollution, previously it was not possible to directly correlate an individual’s symptoms with their exposure to air pollutants. Measuring people’s lung performance while measuring ambient air pollution exposure could shed new light on the links between air pollution and asthma, perhaps resulting in better treatments.
Clearly there are many thorny privacy concerns, but that’s the difficult (and fun) part to work out and begin to address.
Still, I think this example is on the mark in trying to link infrastructure, natural or man-made and population health patterns.
