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Mobile Phone Data Can Track the Spread of Infectious Diseases

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: August 22nd, 2015, 2:00pm UTC

jan_jes writes: Researchers have used anonymous mobile phone records for more than 15 million people to track the spread of rubella disease in Kenya and were able to quantitatively show that mobile phone data can predict seasonal disease patterns. The researchers compared the cellphone analysis with a highly detailed dataset on rubella incidence in Kenya. They matched; the cellphone movement patterns lined up with the rubella incidence figures. In both of their analyses, rubella spiked three times a year. This showed the researchers that cellphone movement can be a predictor of infectious-disease spread.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Mobile+Phone+Data+Can+Track+the+Spread+of+Infectious+Diseases%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1Js2oaq"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmobile.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F08%2F22%2F1733214%2Fmobile-phone-data-can-track-the-spread-of-infectious-diseases%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/15/08/22/1733214/mobile-phone-data-can-track-the-spread-of-infectious-diseases?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/15/08/22/1733214/mobile-phone-data-can-track-the-spread-of-infectious-diseases?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/90KoPeCspYE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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