Industry Description
Tracking epidemic outbreaks like SARS in 2002 (Wikipedia, n. d.) or Ebolo in 2014 (CDC, n.d.) is key to stopping such outbreaks. Public health authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) are tasked to do such epidemiological tracking and even though their are not an industry per se, they provide vital services to the public as a whole. |
| SARS Travels (Cagle, 2003) |
Mobile technology can change how disease outbreaks can be tracked and eventually stopped or sometimes even prevented, e.g. in Pakistan where smartphones are presenting outbreaks of Dengue fever (Rojahn, 2012).
19th century British doctor Snow - known as the father of epidemiology (Vachan, 2005) - painstakingly traced the source of a London cholera outbreak to a pump in a city's neighborhood. He did so by mapping cases of the disease he found to identify the so called "index case" where it all started (Willingham & Helft, 2014). Just imagine how mobile technology would have made Dr. Snow's epidemiological investigation easier, faster and how it may have saved lives.
Global Opportunities
With the increase in mobility outbreaks are not longer confined to a city and its neighborhood (like in the 19th century). Within 24 hours any infected patient can fly to any place in the world.
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| www.healthmap.org |
Social Media has already been used to predict and track disease outbreak. For example HealthMap (http://healthmap.org/) mines news websites, government alerts, eyewitness accounts and other data sources for outbreaks of various illnesses reported around the world. The site aggregates those cases on a global map, with outbreaks displayed in real time.
With more and more people carrying smartphones with them (2 Billion worldwide by 2016 according to eMarketer, 2014), the smartphone itself has become a invaluable source of data for tracking movements of patients who have contracted an infectious disease. Patients movement can be tracked much faster and more accurately speeding up the process of epidemiological tracking considerably, stopping the wider spread of a disease and potentially saving lives.
Mobile technology can also help doctors treating infected patients by capturing information about the status, treatment, etc. and immediately shared it with experts that might be thousand of kilometers away that are helping in coordinating an effective response (WHO n.d.).
New Business Model
As mentioned public health is not an industry per se and it's regulated by national laws and regulation. Privacy concerns in tracking and sharing personal information stored on mobile devices is governed by various sometimes contradicting national rules and regulation (e.g. in Hong Kong the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance).In order to provide mobile technology and analysis capabilities to use the information gathered from doctors from patients and from their mobile devices inter-governmental agreements or supra-national organizations (like WHO) need to provide the regulatory framework to allow for such information gathering, analysis and exchange.
New cooperation model between the various nations, new ways to define and fund technological standards to be able to compare and share mobile data need to be define, agreed and implemented. Such standards would have to then flow into the manufacturing process of any mobile devices to be able to gather and analyze the data.
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| Number of Internet users in 2011: This map illustrates the total number of Internet users in a country as well as the percentage of the population that had Internet access in 2011. (Oxford Internet Institute, 2013) |
Mobile technology though will not be able to track the spread of an infectious disease alone as long as there are a large number of people who do not own a phone (let alone and smartphone) and do not have access to the internet. Smaller and cheaper mobile devices may be able in the future to close this gap.
References
Cagle, D. (2003). SARS Travel. Retrieved on 3 May 2015 from http://www.classbrain.com/artteensb/publish/printer_84.shtmlCDC (n. d.). 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa. Retrieved on 23 April 2015 from http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/
eMarketer (2014), 2 Billion Consumers Worldwide to Get Smart(phones) by 2016. Retrieved on 3 May 2015 from http://www.emarketer.com/Article/2-Billion-Consumers-Worldwide-Smartphones-by-2016/1011694
Oxford Internet Institute (2013). Internet Population and Penetration 2011. Retrieved on 2 May 2015 from http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=internet-population-and-penetration
Rojahn, S. J. (2012). Pakistan Uses Smartphone Data to Head Off Dengue Outbreak. Retrieved on 22 April 2015 from http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506276/pakistan-uses-smartphone-data-to-head-off-dengue-outbreak/
Vatican, D. (2005), Doctor John Snow Blames Water Pollution for Cholera Epidemic. Retrieved on 3 May 2015 from http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/fatherofepidemiology.html
WHO (n. d.). Global Alert and Response (GAR). Retrieved on 22 April 2015 from http://www.who.int/csr/en/
Wikipedia (n. d.), Timeline of the SARS outbreak, Retrieved 23 April 2015 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_SARS_outbreak
Willingham, E. & Helft, L. (2014). Tracking Disease Outbreaks. Retrieved on 22 April 2015 from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/disease-outbreaks.html
