Mobile phone tracking software is viewed with suspicion by many but it could be helping save lives by tracking movements in Ebola-torn West Africa.
Over 4,400 lives have been already lost in the current Ebola epidemic and recent estimates are predicting there will soon be over 10,000 new cases per week. These staggering figures make it by far the most serious epidemic since HIV/AIDs.
Ebola is not particularly infective compared with many other viruses. An Ebola sufferer on average will infect 1.7 people whereas the figure is closer to 18 for a measles sufferer. Let’s also not forget that over 160,000 people die from measles every year. But the eventual death toll from Ebola is likely to be much higher, warns the WHO.
Although research is being fast-tracked, there is still no effective cure widely available and there is a real shortage of both medical personnel and isolation facilities in the countries that are worst affected.
However, a growing number of data scientists believe that one of the keys to helping track and contain the outbreak is through the use of mobile phones. These are widely owned in even the poorest African nations and, whilst most lack the sophistication of smart phones, they can still be a valuable tool.
Anonymised voice and text data from 150,000 mobile phones in Senegal were recently passed to Flowminder, a Swedish non-profit organisation, from which they produced detailed maps of population movements. This information can be used to pinpoint the most effective places to place treatment centres and the travel routes it is most important to control.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are going one step further. By using mobile phone mast activity data from mobile operators, they are mapping where calls to helplines are mostly coming from. This provides a live picture of the ever-changing situation rather than the historic data from Flowminder. Hopefully, it will make it possible to effectively model how the virus may spread.
The picture is made more useful by combining the new data with existing information from censuses. The level of activity at each mobile phone mast also gives a kind of heatmap of where people are and crucially, where and how far they are moving.
Mobile phones have been used in past outbreaks to convey health messages to the population but this is the first time that aid agencies have possessed more than anecdotal information on where to concentrate their efforts.
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