A Real Time Epidemic Alert Generation System for Rural Areas Using WBANs and Kiosks

摘要

The key to effectively controlling an epidemic situation and reducing the number of casualties, is to devise a surveillance system which is capable of generating real time alerts for apprising the concerned health authorities in a timely manner. Since rural areas also suffer from poor connectivity both in terms of transport and network, and lesser access to good medical facilities, deploying such a system while keeping the rural population in mind becomes even more important. Although there are at present a number of offline systems for the prediction of epidemics, they are not sufficient to handle the dynamics of such a situation in a real-time manner. There are also some works on the control and containment of an epidemic situation. However, the aim of this paper is predominantly epidemic detection and alert for an epidemic in an area. We have devised a framework to raise alerts for an epidemic scenario in any region where the number of villagers reported with symptoms of a particular disease crosses a threshold value. At any point it will also give the current number of infected, semi infected and not infected patients based on the symptoms.