Flu Near You: An Online Self-reported Influenza Surveillance System in the USA

Authors

  • Rumi Chunara Harvard Medical School; Boston Children's Hospital
  • Susan Aman Boston Children's Hospital
  • Mark Smolinski Skoll Global Threats Fund
  • John S. Brownstein Harvard Medical School; Boston Children's Hospital

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v5i1.4456

Abstract

In order to simultaneously learn about influenza activity and epidemiology across the nation, we harnessed the Internet and volunteers from around the nation to develop a participatory system for monitoring influenza-like-illness, called Flu Near You. Building on the work of participatory systems in other countries, we created a platform for weekly collection of the prevalence of 10 symptoms from volunteers. A freely available website provides an illustration of the distribution of users and their symptoms, by week. After a year of operation and with user feedback, we are able to evaluate design of the platform. Subsequent years will focus on expanding the system and detailed analysis of the data.

Author Biography

Rumi Chunara, Harvard Medical School; Boston Children's Hospital

Rumi Chunara, PhD is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, with a background in building biological sensors. Her interests are on using information obtained from personal sensors to describe and predict population-level public health issues. Rumi is trained as an engineer and received her BS in electrical engineering with honours from Caltech, and her doctoral studies were through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

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Published

2013-03-23

How to Cite

Chunara, R., Aman, S., Smolinski, M., & Brownstein, J. S. (2013). Flu Near You: An Online Self-reported Influenza Surveillance System in the USA. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v5i1.4456

Issue

Section

Poster Presentations