We’re thinking about how we can leverage mobile network big data to help manage infectious diseases. Now the Economist has gotten on the case:
Doing the same with Ebola would be hard: in west Africa most people do not own a phone. But CDRs are nevertheless better than simulations based on stale, unreliable statistics. If researchers could track population flows from an area where an outbreak had occurred, they could see where it would be likeliest to break out next—and therefore where they should deploy their limited resources. Yet despite months of talks, and the efforts of the mobile-network operators’ trade association and several smaller UN agencies, telecoms firms have not let researchers use the data (see article).
One excuse is privacy, which is certainly a legitimate worry, particularly in countries fresh from civil war, or where tribal tensions exist. But the phone data can be anonymised and aggregated in a way that alleviates these concerns. A bigger problem is institutional inertia. Big data is a new field. The people who grasp the benefits of examining mobile-phone usage tend to be young, and lack the clout to free them for research use.
It’s an old problem
This needs to change. Governments should require mobile operators to give approved researchers access to their CDRs. The data will obviously not by themselves prevent this outbreak from turning into a disaster. That will take an extraordinary combination of new drugs, careful prevention and patient care, among other things. But the health workers dealing with Ebola on the ground need all the help they can get.
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