TY - JOUR
T1 - Public health for the people
T2 - Participatory infectious disease surveillance in the digital age
AU - Wójcik, Oktawia P.
AU - Brownstein, John S.
AU - Chunara, Rumi
AU - Johansson, Michael A.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014/6/20
Y1 - 2014/6/20
N2 - The 21st century has seen the rise of Internet-based participatory surveillance systems for infectious diseases. These systems capture voluntarily submitted symptom data from the general public and can aggregate and communicate that data in near real-time. We reviewed participatory surveillance systems currently running in 13 different countries. These systems have a growing evidence base showing a high degree of accuracy and increased sensitivity and timeliness relative to traditional healthcare-based systems. They have also proven useful for assessing risk factors, vaccine effectiveness, and patterns of healthcare utilization while being less expensive, more flexible, and more scalable than traditional systems. Nonetheless, they present important challenges including biases associated with the population that chooses to participate, difficulty in adjusting for confounders, and limited specificity because of reliance only on syndromic definitions of disease limits. Overall, participatory disease surveillance data provides unique disease information that is not available through traditional surveillance sources.
AB - The 21st century has seen the rise of Internet-based participatory surveillance systems for infectious diseases. These systems capture voluntarily submitted symptom data from the general public and can aggregate and communicate that data in near real-time. We reviewed participatory surveillance systems currently running in 13 different countries. These systems have a growing evidence base showing a high degree of accuracy and increased sensitivity and timeliness relative to traditional healthcare-based systems. They have also proven useful for assessing risk factors, vaccine effectiveness, and patterns of healthcare utilization while being less expensive, more flexible, and more scalable than traditional systems. Nonetheless, they present important challenges including biases associated with the population that chooses to participate, difficulty in adjusting for confounders, and limited specificity because of reliance only on syndromic definitions of disease limits. Overall, participatory disease surveillance data provides unique disease information that is not available through traditional surveillance sources.
KW - Dengue
KW - Disease surveillance
KW - Influenza-like illness
KW - Participatory surveillance
KW - Participatory surveillance system
KW - Public health
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84902748526&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84902748526&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1186/1742-7622-11-7
DO - 10.1186/1742-7622-11-7
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84902748526
VL - 11
JO - Emerging Themes in Epidemiology
JF - Emerging Themes in Epidemiology
SN - 1742-7622
IS - 1
M1 - 7
ER -