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DIYcity Challenge #5: Outbreak!

Submitted by John Geraci on 3 March 2009 - 8:01pm to Discussions.

Design an app that works as an early warning system for outbreaks of flu, colds and other communicable disease at the city level. Bonus points for making it a system that can be easily applied to any city. Extra bonus points for going so far as to outline a spec for getting it built.

And once we have this one in the bag, we'll build it.

p.s. - Tweet this Challenge!

03 Mar21:58

Twitter Searches and Google Maps?

By paulmwatson

I'm in the middle of a bit of a head cold and have spent most of the day Twittering away.

How about a first stab that uses Twitter to see outbreaks? You can use keywords ("have a cold", "flu", "feeling sick", "coughing blood" etc.) and location (most Twitter messages have enough geo info. to map a city.)

I checked a few Twitter searches and the results are decent:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flu
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=feeling+sick
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=coughing

Could then run it through Google Maps or keep it simple and do graphs by city/country.

cheers,
Paul

03 Mar22:03

"Near" operator

By paulmwatson

I just noticed Twitter Search supports a "near" operator e.g. near:NYC.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flu+near%3ANYC

You can also combine it with "since" and "until" to scope the search to today, yesterday, this week etc. Do a few of those, compare search results and then graph the data.

Notifications can be handled by creating a Twitter flubot that people subscribe to. They give it their city and the flubot notifies them of any trending illnesses in their area.

03 Mar22:18

re: near operator

By John Geraci

awesome. this is pretty much what I was thinking too, but I didn't realize they had a 'near' operator built in.

so then what you'd do is slice by city/metro area and plot the daily number of tweets about flu/cold/etc for that area.

and establish a baseline of tweets about those things for each area, so that whenever there was a spike you would send out an alert, or whatever.

i think that would work really well.

anyone want to help build it? get in touch if you do.

(you could also take this a lot further, mapping it, plotting city against city data, etc - lots you could do with this...)

03 Mar22:23

I'm a web-developer and have

By paulmwatson

I'm a web-developer and have been doing some Twitter related projects lately so I'll see what I can whip up this evening (have to be Rails though, not a Java-head.) Just the base-line and alert level bits I'll probably need help with (not a maths guy so have no idea how to normalise over time etc.) I've registered http://twitter.com/flubot for now.

If this works and is usable then it could be pretty flexible for any kind of outbreak (germs, memes, riots etc.)

03 Mar22:27

Hash tags

By clint

In combination with the "near" operator and other search scope utilities there is the hash tag attribute. http://hashtags.org/. This could create a standard for certain topics or sicknesses, ie #flu, #cold, #allergies.

http://hashtags.org/.

I am very interested in helping build this out!

03 Mar22:28

google.org's flu trends

By dave_menninger

For the flu google.org has a nicely polished site. It doesn't cover anything else like colds or other diseases though:

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Also, it doesn't have any built in method to alert people.

I believe the data is is based on users' google searches and is available aggregated here: http://www.google.org/about/flutrends/download.html

Not sure if the Google or the Twitter would have the fastest reaction time to an outbreak.

~dave

03 Mar22:34

helping build this out

By John Geraci

Great - Paul and Clint, contact me off-list at geraci at gmail-d-com and let's start to whip something up.

Others please keep drilling down on this idea, and feel free to join in with Paul, Clint and me on putting something together.

03 Mar22:38

google flutrends

By John Geraci

Yeah, Google of course has this, and it's great.

Doesn't do down to the city-level though, does it? And isn't open source, and probably not as light-weight as I bet we can make this.

And of course not open source, so nobody can build on it, play with it, extend it.

03 Mar23:46

re: helping build this out

By John Geraci

This message I wrote earlier got eaten by the system apparently:

Great - Paul and Clint, contact me off-list at geraci at gmail-d-com and let's start to whip something up.

Others please keep drilling down on this idea, and feel free to join in with Paul, Clint and me on putting something together.

04 Mar13:11

WhoIsSick.org

By Anthony Townsend

This has been around for a few years, not sure of the origins or any plugs to the data, but was definitely a precursor to FluTrends in attempting to crowdsource sick reports.

http://whoissick.org/sickness/

04 Mar19:56

re: whoissick.org

By John Geraci

that site nearly crashed my browser!

time for a new, better version.

and we've got a really smart team of people working on it right now.