Public Health Surveillance using Decentralized Technologies

Public Health Surveillance Using Global Health Explorer

We demonstrate an early version of a semantic web tool, Global Health Explorer (GHX), that can be used to conduct public health surveillance using Twitter. Our infrastructure can use any controlled vocabulary to extract term uses in Twitter and supports hypothesis formation and exploration of data sets using visual analysis. The resulting data, gathered in RDF, makes it possible to analyze term...

Investigating Public Health Surveillance using Twitter

Microblog services such as Twitter are an attractive source of data for public health surveillance, as they avoid the legal and technical obstacles to accessing the more obvious and targeted sources of health information. Only a tiny fraction of tweets may contain useful public health information but in Twitter this is offset by the sheer volume of tweets posted. We present a system which can i...

Using funnel plots in public health surveillance

BACKGROUND Public health surveillance is often concerned with the analysis of health outcomes over small areas. Funnel plots have been proposed as a useful tool for assessing and visualizing surveillance data, but their full utility has not been appreciated (for example, in the incorporation and interpretation of risk factors). METHODS We investigate a way to simultaneously focus funnel plot ...

Public Health Surveillance

Ethics in public health surveillance.

Public health programmes pose some very important ethical problems. One of the most pressing is the possible conflict between individual interests (and rights) and collective interests, which becomes particularly important in the public health surveillance setting. The present article first looks at the definitions of "public health surveillance" in a historical context and then identifies the ...