A mobile health based smart hybrid epidemic surveillance system to support epidemic control programme in public health informatics

Detecting epidemic out breaks as early as possible and gathering reports to substantiate the cause and carrying out immediate actions for alerting public and taking action are major targets of a public health epidemic surveillance. Challenges for an epidemiologist lies in reaching out and collecting information from a territory especially in getting informal reports from public rather than gathering formal reports from clinical trial people like doctors and micro biologists. The smart phones and internet usage is reaching out common people rapidly due to the technological growth over past 15 years. Hence technology adaptation using mobile apps would not be a major constraint in reaching out people for conducting surveillance. Our proposed methodology suggested for public health surveillance programme part of public health informatics is a smart phone based surveillance system where epidemiologist can trigger survey queries through web portal and notify them to all the intended community through mobile app of registered smart phone users. The information retrieved back as reply for the queries can be easily stored in centralized real time database and can be analyzed by using machine Learning techniques. Prediction messages, alert messages and precautionary messages are send to targeted group of community under epidemic surveillance as common message as well as individual messages specifically addressing an individual who had participated in the survey. Real time databases are ideal foil to the mobile health based epidemic surveillance system. The pilot testing of the proposed prototype provided the instant benefit of immediate reachability of survey to selected and intended group. Mobile app based surveillance provided much improved reporting of information in quick time on diseases, symptoms, factors and more. Information gathered was analyzed for substantiating cause and alert and preventive messages were immediately send through the same app.