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FluLog: Automated Contact Tracing Tool Developed by National University of Singapore Engineering ResearcherSINGAPORE, Jul 01, 2009 (ASCRIBE NEWS via COMTEX) -- Contact tracing identifies those in danger of contracting infectious diseases and plays an important role in limiting the effects of pandemics. It is currently performed in two ways. In the first type of contact tracing, infected patients are interviewed regarding their recent contacts. The drawbacks of this approach include the fact that human memory is fallible and that patients cannot know all the people they have been in the vicinity of. The other form of contact tracing involves asking people to sign in when they enter a building. In large buildings, which can hold hundreds of people, this is ineffective as it does not provide finegrained information regarding the people in the immediate vicinity of the patient. In addition, neither form of contact tracing can track the contacts of an infected patient in spaces such as elevators, washrooms, etc. FluLog, developed by Dr Mehul Motani from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Engineering, is an automated contact tracing system that identifies people who were in the vicinity of the patient with information about the contact length, time of contact, etc. The FluLog system comprised two parts - one residing on mobile phones, and the other on the internet. Mobile phones which run the FluLog program conduct proximity sensing of other phones in the vicinity of the user. They use Bluetooth technology to sense the unique Bluetooth IDs of mobile phones around them. If location information (GPS, for example) is available on the phone, the location at which the Bluetooth device was encountered can be identified. By conducting periodic searches every minute, FluLog keeps a log of the contacts encountered on the mobile phone. These contact logs are sent to a central server every hour via GPRS. FluLog also requires users to register on a website (http://blueapps.dyndns.org/) with personal particulars and the unique Bluetooth address of their mobile phone. Using the hourly contact logs uploaded by the mobile phones, the FluLog system can correlate the personal particulars with the unique IDs logged by the phone. This data can then be mined by healthcare professionals to identify those that are in danger of being infected. With location data, one can also identify the likely location at which people were infected, which could be useful in locating breeding grounds of vectors such as the Aedes mosquito. Since mobile phones are carried by users at all times, FluLog can generate contact logs for patients regardless of their location. Further, the system uses Bluetooth device discovery which can detect people in the range of up to 10 meters making it a good measure of proximity. Finally, tracking of a patient's contact history can be accomplished in a matter of seconds with data that is up-to-date to the latest hour. The FluLog system has been deployed in 2006 for a trial organised at the NUS Central Library. The research team is currently planning for a larger scale deployment. For more information, please contact: Ms Fun Yip Senior Manager Office of Corporate Relations National University of Singapore Tel: (65) 6516 1374 Email: [email protected] ((AScribe - The Public Interest Newswire / http://www.ascribe.org)) |