The use of mobile and social network technology for tracking health data seems to be big news this week. Here are some recent nonprofit efforts on a global scale, and a locally focused social health effort worth noting.
The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Hewlett Packard, and African mobile network provider Mascom Wireless are collaborating on an effort to bolster surveillance of malaria outbreaks in Botswana. Health care workers will be using donated smart phones to collect data, pictures, audio, and video on malaria cases and geo-tag the locations of outbreaks with GPS coordinates. This use of mobile technology rather than paper-based research could speed up the detection of outbreaks and improve quality control of data input.
Similarly, Health Map is an online resource to monitor and predict disease outbreaks. Since 2006 they have worked with partners such as Google and the CDC to track health trends and more recently have started a global early warning system for emerging diseases that move between wildlife and people.
Start-up Sickweather brings disease monitoring to the local level by using social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and geo-data to predict where illness may strike next.
The company uses “real time data available on the health of our population” and cross references it with location tags to produce real time “weather maps” of reported symptoms. This information is then used to forecast the movement of everything from stomach bugs to chronic illness.
While the HP malaria project and the Health Map initiatives are global and contribute to the greater good, translating similar functions to the local level creates unique challenges.
Sickweather could help families avoid the latest chicken pox outbreak at daycare, but it raises privacy and accuracy concerns. Mining social data could alter people’s willingness to post about illness, since it could create uncomfortable social situations, like avoiding the birthday party for a child with a sick sibling. While Sickweather works on the personal and local level, it can also be used at an aggregate level for whole cities, benefitting a much larger network.
What do you think? Would you share your health information with others for the greater good?
