LIRNEasia‘s recently completed pilot project on the use of mobile phones for early detection of communicable diseases, led by Nuwan Waidyantha, was showcased at a press conference yesterday at Cinnamon Lakeside, Colombo. Below is an excerpt of an article appearing in Lanka Business Online. The ‘real-time bio-surveillance programme’ enables the rapid detection and notification of potential health outbreaks through mobile phones, software applications and a Web interface, said LIRNEasia, a regional information communications technology think tank. … The system was useful because of recent outbreaks of communicable diseases, with health authorities only aware of an outbreak when the media reported the death of several people. With the new system, data on patients and symptoms of illnesses are sent through mobile phones in real-time from hospital wards to the epidemiological centre.
Press Release 2009 from Brown Lloyd James. ICTD2009 highlights new developments in technology for developing countries “Dr. Artur Dubrawski, Director of the AutonLab at Carnegie Mellon University and Mr. Nuwan Waidyanatha, Senior Researcher and Project Director of LIRNEasia in Sri Lanka, are presenting their collaborative project using mobile telephony. The project uses the T-Cube Web Interface, a tool developed by Carnegie Mellon University to visualize and manipulate large scale multivariate time series datasets, to support real-time bio-surveillance.