This Tuesday at Change, Fahad Pervaiz will present his work on Punjab-IDSS (http://punjab-idss.org), an intelligent disease surveillance system that leverages health hotlines and an active mobile health-workforce for disease spread tracking, early prediction and containment of dengue-related epidemics in Punjab, Pakistan.

In response to the 2011 dengue outbreak, the Punjab government started a dengue health hotline that enables mobile users to report dengue-like symptoms, larvae accumulation and obtain valuable feedback on preventive measures.  A total of 117,470 complaints have been recorded in the system till date.  The Punjab-IDSS system leverages the health hotline information combined with Internet-based news monitoring tools to provide accurate, real-time dengue epidemic detection at a fine-grained location granularity within a city. To achieve this goal, the system uses a combination of several sophisticated statistical learning algorithms combined with locality-specific dengue propagation models. Our system is also connected to the Dengue Patient Reporting Systems used by major hospitals in Lahore to report suspected and confirmed cases of dengue.  Another component of the Punjab-IDSS system is an disease activity tracking system where a team of 1500 mobile healthworkers with android phones conduct state-wide disease control activities.  For dengue cases detected from the health hotlines, the workers can be mobilized for implementing focused dengue containment strategies. The health workers use the android devices to gather verifiable proof of larvae accumulation in different localities. We are currently rigorously evaluating the effectiveness of our dengue containment strategies.

Fahad Pervaiz is a Graduate Student Researcher who is working on technologies to make health systems better. He is currently involved in building systems that will improve health care in developing countries. He worked on dengue surveillance system of Punjab province of Pakistan. This is the primary system used by Government to track dengue in Punjab. This work was done in collaboration with Punjab IT Board (PITB) while he worked as a researcher in NEWT Lab, Lahore University of Management Sciences. He also analyzed data of water-born diseases, during 2010 Pakistan floods emergency, with Punjab Health Ministry to make a drop-in early warning system. He is currently a PhD student in Department of Computer Science & Engineering of University of Washington (UW). He is working with Richard Anderson on Cold Chain Equipment Management tools apart from his involvement in Punjab Government's effort to implement dengue surveillance system like technologies for other diseases.

What: Fahad Pervaiz on detecting dengue outbreaks.
When: Tuesday, February 12th at 12 noon. 
Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203.