Integrating Mobile Data with GIS for strategic diseases control in public health

P.P. ESCOBAR; M. SANTIAGO; M. DEL FRESNO; J. MASSA

Global Telemedicine and eHealth Updates. Knowledge Resources

LuxExpo

Lugar: Luxemburgo; Año: 2010 vol. 3 p. 142 - 146

1998-5509

Although the mapping of health data is well known in epidemiology, advances in geographic information system (GIS) technology provide new opportunities for developing applications for strategic control and decision making in public health. The use of GIS becomes an essential tool for controlling several aspects related to country’s health, especially in developing countries, taking advantages of digital mapping to help planning the utilization of limited economic, physical and human resources. In this pilot project in progress, a GIS is enhanced with new health layers created from data received from a mobile phone network strategically distributed along the country. The network consist in a group of epidemiologic physicians, each one using a specific mobile phone, acting as sentinels of diseases, reporting all cases detected over a region of interest. These formatted reports feed a health layer with demographic data, time, type of disease, number and severity of cases, location, etc. The GIS fuses fixed geographic data elements with dynamic data coming from the mobile network. Health layer are managed by a web-based GIS application with different mining tools which provide specific features, like a situational awareness tool for quick information display, where users can see in real-time spatial distribution of illness’ cases, get statistical reports, compare disease rates across regions of the country, trace the number of cases occurred and obtain a trend, for assessing the disease evolution and make strategic decisions aiming to control this evolution by adopting new and strong preventive and corrective actions. This combined technology can be used to develop health plans and public health policies regarding to endemics, epidemics or pandemics situation, such as Dengue, HIV, Malaria, Chagas, AH1N1 influenza and others. It will also help to manage other health concerns like chronic diseases (diabetes, cardiac, obesity, etc), birth control, health education and epidemiology for common and rare disease control. The potential use of GIS needs to be discussed considering methods and limitations. Information of weather, environment conditions, potable water availability, electricity, traffic and other can be added to enhance the capabilities of GIS technology using correlation among different factors in order to match significant data. Regarding to its use in health, it showed to be a great valuable tool for disease control and strategic decision making in public health.