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Home Current Topics Monitoring Hand Hygiene, Infectious Diseases with Phone Apps, Twitter
Monitoring Hand Hygiene, Infectious Diseases with Phone Apps, Twitter Print E-mail

 

Touchscreen devices and microblogging are being put to ingenious use for tracking infectious diseases and monitoring compliance with disease-preventing hygiene regimens, according to several participants who outlined their approaches to these tasks during the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, held in Philadelphia, Pa., last October.  

Audio Interview with Philip Polgreen
 A new approach to monitoring hand hygiene depends on a software applications (app), called iScrub, written and designed for use with the iPhone. The app is being made available free through the iTunes App Store and via iPod, according to Chris Hlady, a graduate student at the University of Iowa (UI), Iowa City. He developed the software as part of a project to automate the monitoring of hand-hygiene practices in health care settings. While designed for hospital staff, iScrub also could become a "stealth app" to keep tabs on whether workers at food-handling or other kinds of facilities wash their hands on a regular basis.

With appropriate apps in hand, phones and other touch-screen devices can track handwashing compliance in several categories, including job classification of the individual carrying the device and his or her location in a hospital, whether in an isolation unit or an ordinary ward. Results are automatically e-mailed to administrative staff to provide them with immediate results and enabling them to offer feedback to miscreant handwashers. Data can be downloaded to a website where aggregate information becomes accessible for more extensive analyses. "The feedback to our demos from the people that do the hand-hygiene observations has been overwhelmingly positive," Hlady says. "It has been challenging, though, to incorporate all of the subtly different workflows of the institutions that have provided us feedback into one application which handles all of their quirks while remaining user friendly."

Meanwhile, micro-blogging via Twitter is being evaluated as a means for tracking infectious diseases, according to another UI graduate student, Alessio Signoroni, who works with Philip Polgreen. The 2009 outbreak of H1N1 provided them an opportunity for testing Twitter, whose format is limited to electronically transmitted messages containing no more than 140 characters, as an approach for tracking disease outbreaks. From the end of April, the UI researchers began collecting Twitter messages, or "tweets," based on their containing one or another H1N1-related search term. They plotted those tweets on a world map, chronicling the response of the Twitter community to the emergence of the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico and its subsequent spread.

Business was brisk. By June, they assembled 950,000 tweets containing terms such as H1N1, swine, flu, or influenza from the 336 million total tweets that were posted during that interval. The greatest numbers of H1N1-related messages were posted in early May, with a steady drop thereafter-paradoxically, as the overall number of H1N1 cases continued to rise. Later, other search terms, including vaccine and shot, brought another surge of 687,000 tweets during October.

"Some members of our group are trying to correlate tweet contents and flu patterns, as well as exploring the differences in users' activities while healthy versus sick," Signoroni says. "If our experiments are successful, public authorities could use those daily predictions to complement official reports while making their decisions." For additional information, visit the website of the UI Computational Epidemiology Group (http://vinci.cs.uiowa.edu/index.php/Main/Home).

Brian Hoyle
Brian ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) owns and runs Square Rainbow Ltd., a science writing and editing company.