CROWD-SOURCED ACQUISITION OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION FOR INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC SURVEILLANCE

摘要

Public health and monitoring of disease outbreaks are becoming important applications for geoinformatics. Knowledge of the geospatial and temporal distribution of emerging cases is critical to support public health agencies in their efforts to respond, control, and treat infectious diseases. The timeliness of this information is particularly important for rapidly spreading diseases such as influenza. However traditional disease surveillance procedures, which rely on reports from doctors and officials who are overworked during times of crisis, tend to lag the onset of symptoms by days or even weeks."Crowd-sourcing" is an emerging Internet concept which allows large groups of people to contribute to tasks which have traditionally been handled by small groups of experts. This paper reports on the use of crowd-sourcing during the influenza epidemic of 2009 to provide early information about outbreaks of flu in Taiwan. The surveillance system consists of a simple, web-based reporting application that allows naive users to report the nature and geographic location of flu-like symptoms. The web application collates the reports and presents summary information in map form and as graphs. Both public health officials and the general public can view these results, which are continuously updated and are supplemented by health education and influenza-related news from Taiwan and around the globe.The results of this study show considerable promise in providing information about the location and intensity of disease outbreaks more rapidly than other approaches. Our work is applicable to other geographic locations as well as other diseases such as polio in Africa and virulent new strains of malaria in Thailand. Difficulties found during this pilot study will be addressed in future phases of the research.