2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

What’s in Your Pocket? Trends in Mobile Apps for 
Biosurveillance and Decision-Making

Courtney D. Corley*1, Onicio Leal-Neto2, Craig Taylor3, César Escobar-Viera4 and Victor 
Del Rio Vilas5

1Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA; 2Epitrack, Recife, Brazil; 3Cojengo, Glasgow, United Kingdom; 
4University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; 5Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Objective
To review current trends and issues in the development and use 

of mobile apps for public health surveillance and decision making
in settings with different resource availability and technological 
development. The panel discussion will address cross-cutting issues 
of general interest, including timeliness, recruitment, validation, and 
engagement by presenting innovative examples of apps conceived for 
various uses in human and animal surveillance.

Introduction
An increasing number of mobile applications available for 

download provide biosurveillance capabilities using new and
traditional data streams. Biosurveillance apps span a wide range of 
settings, uses, technologies, and resource capacities that provide health 
analysts rapid and efficient means of data collection, visualization, 
and analyses. However, this technological “heaven” is not free from 
the challenges of traditional biosurveillance applications, namely 
validation to inform specificity and recruitment and engagement to 
ensure representativeness. This panel will provide guidance for future 
development and utility of mobile apps by illustrating how these 
matters are addressed in field tested mobile applications.

Description
The panel comprises epidemiologists, data scientists, and 

technology partners who will address the full application lifecycle
of several biosurveillance apps, from the assessment of the specific 
demand, resource, and technology specifications, to implementation 
and evaluation. The panel also describes how the apps highlighted 
navigated their specific setting constraints and the lessons learned 
in addressing standard biosurveillance issues, namely timeliness, 
validation, engagement and recruitment. Court Corley’s “Data - if 
we can get it, should we use it?” presentation covers the types of data 
useful for “mobile health”, if they differ from traditional public health 
data sources, and the issues around using novel open web data sources 
due to legal and ethical concerns. Onicio Leal-Neto’s “Saúde na Copa 
App - Engaging users with participatory surveillance” presentation
discusses methods for actively and passively engaging with mobile 
users to promote health surveillance and decision apps during mass 
gatherings. “MozzieMap, a tool to enhance the decision-making 
process for vector abatement programs” by Cesar Escobar-Viera 
describes mobile applications to improve tracking and prediction of 
changes in mosquito population for vector-borne diseases. Finally, 
Craig Taylor describes “VetAfrica: a mobile application developed 
by Cojengo supported by the Microsoft 4Afrika initiative” to address 
the lack of access to experienced veterinary assistance on the ground, 
accurate real time disease surveillance data, and misdiagnosis of 
livestock diseases in Kenya.

The subsequent discussion will evaluate how the new systems 
improved biosurveillance and their impact on the health of the 
targeted populations, as well as their contribution to the development 
of the “mobile health” field. The panel provides the basis for an 
evaluation framework and constitutes a repository of practical advice 

for the development and implementation of biosurveillance apps. 
Throughout the panel, the moderator will question the audience via 
a newly developed web app about their collective experience with 
biosurveillance apps.

Audience Engagement
The panel will be presented with the novel online software tool 

Prezi so that the audience can engage with the content during the
panel. For question asking and prioritization we will use multiple 
methods. First, we will allow the auidence to SMS the moderator 
their questions, Secondly, we will employ a webapp to be developed 
collaboratively by the panelists to directly engage the audience in 
gathering and sharing real-time feedback. In order to be dynamic 
to the audience needs, we provide the audience a hashtag to use 
when chatting about the panel in social media and the panelists and 
moderator will monitor the back channel conversations and adjust the 
discussion appropriately.

Keywords
mobile applications; biosurveillance; engagement; timeliness

Acknowledgments

The MozzieMap app was supported by a contract from the U.S. Defense 
Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Joint Science and Technology Office 
for Chemical and Biological Defense under project numbers CB4045 to 
the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). PNNL is operated by 
Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE- ACO5-
76RLO 1830. The Saúde na Copa App was funded by the Skoll Global 
Threats Fund.

*Courtney D. Corley

E-mail: court@pnnl.gov

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e , 201