Right from the concept stage Carnegie Mellon University’s Auton Lab has been engaging with LIRNEasia and other project partners in developing the “Evaluating a Real-Time Biosurveillance Program: Pilot Project (abbreviated as RTBP) proposal. In the month of July 2008, the International Development Research Center of Canada made available a grant to carry out the RTBP research project.

The RTBP research aims to answer the question: “Can software programs that analyze health statistics and mobile phone applications that collect and report health information potentially be effective in the early detection, intervention, and prevention of disease outbreaks?” This project is a pilot aiming to study the technology, human, and policy predicaments in introducing the RTBP to Sri Lanka and India. Conventional aggregated reports on disease counts or the paper based notification systems in India and Sri Lanka have not proven to be effective in providing the much needed near real-time detection for containing disease before it takes the lives of a few patients. A hypothesis of the RTBP is that introducing real-time detection algorithms and geo-spatial analytical tools will prevent those deaths and will provide the epidemiology units with means to detect disease outbreaks well in advance to control them before reaching the tipping point.

The RTBP implementation stage entail developing software components: a mobile application for collecting health data (patient syndrome information), a set of statistical data mining algorithms with graphic user interfaces for geo-spatial analysis, a comprehensive database with web interfaces, and a Common Alerting Protocol alert and notification system. Health care workers in India and Sri Lanka will be trained, this month and next, to operate the project developed software. Thereafter, these applications are to be field tested, beginning June 2009 for one year, in Sri Lanka through the Sarvodaya Suwadana Center primary healthcare system in collaboration with the Government Kuliyapitiya-District Medical Officer of Health departments and in India through the National Center for Biological Sciences in collaboration with the State of Tamil Nadu Health Department.

The data for disease outbreak analysis will come from the health professionals working in rural India and Sri Lanka. The Village Health Nurses in India and Suwadana Center Health Workers in Sri Lanka are the last-mile health workers providing door-to-door primary health care services to those villages that are almost beyond reach of the urban health care services. Data will also come from rural primary health care facilities where 100 – 500 patients visit these facilities a day.

Auton Lab’s expertise in the field of computer science focus on producing machine learning algorithms with analytical tools that adhere to human computer interaction standards for the domain experts’ easy use and effectively supply results for the decision makers. The challenges faced in developing the algorithms and tools are imposed by the environments these software are applied to; where the availability of data, frequency of the data capture, and the categorization of the data strings govern the complexities in detecting adverse events in the health strings to produce the results for the decision makers’ liking. A team of software engineers, lead by Prof. Artur Dubrawski (Director Auton Lab), are working on 1) data quality aspects and developing algorithms to suite the Sri Lankan and Indian environments, 2) graphic user interfaces for visualizing near real-time analytics, and 3) system integration with external interfaces such as inheriting health data from multiple data streams. T-Cube is the name of the unique Auton Lab brewed underlying software technology that provides the speedy and accurate functionality for the various elements of the data mining algorithms and visualization tools; otherwise cannot be achieved through conventional means or other universally available applications

The RTBP project staff will be trained to use the Auton Lab developed software that and will get to provide feedback to Auton Lab on the usability aspects during the workshop to be held on April 21st, 2009 at Samana Thetha – Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center.

Click to download workshop announcement