Communications of the ACM
How Technology Is Helping Fight Ebola
A variety of technologies are being used to help fight the Ebola outbreak.
Credit: Francois Mori/AP
A wide variety of technologies, from apps and software to big data and robots, are being employed to help fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
One of the main technological weapons against Ebola is electronic health records (EHRs), one of the cornerstones of the Obama administration's health policies meant to bring a more data-driven approach to medicine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been urging vendors to include patient travel histories and records of Ebola symptoms in EHRs to help physicians flag possible carriers. Such information also is being used by the CDC as part of its Epi Info VHF (viral hemorrhagic fever) application, an open source program that enables users to set up patient information databases. Microsoft has pledged cloud service support for this and other services designed to make it easier to track Ebola's spread.
Some technologists have even greater ambitions, using big data to find ways of predicting the spread of the disease. One example is an app created by Swedish firm Flowminder, demonstrated in August, which used data about past Ebola outbreaks and traffic patterns in Senegal to predict the spread of a previous Ebola outbreak in that country. Robots also are being enlisted to carry out frontline missions in the fight against Ebola.
From Government Computer News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found