In the past, companies have frequently neglected early warning signals about potential hazards for human health or the environment associated with their products or operations. This chapter reviews and analyses relevant interdisciplinary literature and prominent case studies — in particular those documented in both volumes of Late lessons from early warnings — and identifies main factors respon...

Early warning systems (EWS) identify patients at risk with a view to improving morbidity and mortality rates using early therapeutic and transfer actions. We have recently implemented an EWS that focuses on two main aspects: the guidance of care after discharge from the ICU, and recognition of the onset of deteriorating health among adult patients in general wards through physiologically based ...

In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of work and school absenteeism surveillance as an early warning system for influenza. In particular, time trends in daily absenteeism rates collected during the A(H1N1)2009 pandemic are compared with weekly incidence rates of influenza-like illness (ILI) obtained from the Belgian Sentinel General Practitioner (SGP) network. The results indicate a ris...

In food supply networks, ensuring quality of end products is a critical issue. The quality of these products depends in a complex way on many factors. In order to effectively control food quality, our research aims at implementing early warning and proactive control systems in food supply networks. In these systems we use data mining techniques and exploit large amounts of operational data coll...

A network early warning system consists of several distributed sensors to detect malicious network activity. The effectiveness of such early warning systems critically depends on the sensor deployment strategy used. We therefore analysed attack patterns of malicious software collected at sensors worldwide to determine an optimal deployment strategy. Our results show that due to the small number...

As a high-risk subindustry involved in construction projects, highway construction safety has experienced major developments in the past 20 years, mainly due to the lack of safe early warnings in Chinese construction projects. By combining the current state of early warning technology with the requirements of the State Administration of Work Safety and using case-based reasoning (CBR), this pap...

Recognition and timely action around "warning signs" of illness exacerbation is central to the self-management of bipolar disorder. Due to its heterogeneity and fluctuating course, passive and active mobile technologies have been increasingly evaluated as adjunctive or standalone tools to predict and prevent risk of worsening of course in bipolar disorder. As predictive analytics approaches to ...

Over the past 5 years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the development of early warning systems for dropout prevention. These warning systems use a set of indicators based on official school records to identify youth at risk for dropout and then appropriately target intervention. The current study builds on this work by assessing the extent to which a school disengagement warning ind...