TY - JOUR
T1 - Fine-grained dengue forecasting using telephone triage services
AU - Rehman, Nabeel Abdur
AU - Kalyanaraman, Shankar
AU - Ahmad, Talal
AU - Pervaiz, Fahad
AU - Saif, Umar
AU - Subramanian, Lakshminarayanan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the government of Punjab and the Punjab Information Technology Board for initiating this project and providing funding and logistical support for this project. We thank the Pakistan Meteorological Department for sharing the weather data sets. Funding: N.A.R. and T.A. were supported as research assistants by Information Technology University, Pakistan, and New York University (NYU) during the course of this project. We thank the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute and the Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at NYU Abu Dhabi for providing funding support for L.S., T.A., and S.K. in this project. S.K. was also partially supported as a postdoctoral fellow by an NSF grant. F.P. is supported on a doctoral fellowship by the University of Washington. Author contributions: T.A., F.P., N.A.R., and U.S. worked closely with the Punjab Information Technology Board to deploy the system, collect the data, and disseminate the results. N.A.R., S.K., L.S., and U.S. designed the study, methods, data analysis, and results. N.A.R., L.S., U.S., and S.K. wrote the manuscript. L.S. and U.S. guided the project and edited the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data, at an aggregated level, needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. Environmental data is publicly available in Pakistan Meteorological department’s website. Call volume data, awareness campaign data, and dengue cases data are the property of the government of Punjab, Pakistan. Under the agreement with the government of Punjab, these data sets may be requested from the authors.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Thousands of lives are lost every year in developing countries for failing to detect epidemics early because of the lack of real-time disease surveillance data. We present results from a large-scale deployment of a telephone triage service as a basis for dengue forecasting in Pakistan. Our system uses statistical analysis of dengue-related phone calls to accurately forecast suspected dengue cases 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time at a subcity level (correlation of up to 0.93). Our system has been operational at scale in Pakistan for the past 3 years and has received more than 300,000 phone calls. The predictions from our system are widely disseminated to public health officials and form a critical part of active government strategies for dengue containment. Our work is the first to demonstrate, with significant empirical evidence, that an accurate, location-specific disease forecasting system can be built using analysis of call volume data from a public health hotline.
AB - Thousands of lives are lost every year in developing countries for failing to detect epidemics early because of the lack of real-time disease surveillance data. We present results from a large-scale deployment of a telephone triage service as a basis for dengue forecasting in Pakistan. Our system uses statistical analysis of dengue-related phone calls to accurately forecast suspected dengue cases 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time at a subcity level (correlation of up to 0.93). Our system has been operational at scale in Pakistan for the past 3 years and has received more than 300,000 phone calls. The predictions from our system are widely disseminated to public health officials and form a critical part of active government strategies for dengue containment. Our work is the first to demonstrate, with significant empirical evidence, that an accurate, location-specific disease forecasting system can be built using analysis of call volume data from a public health hotline.
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U2 - 10.1126/sciadv.1501215
DO - 10.1126/sciadv.1501215
M3 - Article
C2 - 27419226
AN - SCOPUS:85019204092
VL - 2
JO - Science advances
JF - Science advances
SN - 2375-2548
IS - 7
M1 - e1501215
ER -