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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Paolo MissierORCiD, Emeritus Professor Alexander RomanovskyORCiD
Dengue is a disease transmitted by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which also transmits the Zika virus and Chikungunya. Unfortunately, the population of different countries has been suffering from the diseases transmitted by the mosquito. The communities can play an important role in combatting and preventing the mosquito-borne diseases. However, due to the limited engagement of the population, new methods need to be used to strengthen the mosquito surveillance. VazaDengue is one of these solutions that provides services that stand out from the others solutions. Generally speaking VazaDengue is a system that offers the users a platform for preventing and combating mosquito-borne diseases. The system relies on social actions of reporting mosquito breeding sites and dengue cases, in which the reports are made available to the citizens and health agencies. In addition, the system monitors social media network Twitter to enrich the information provided. It processes the natural language text from the network to classify the tweets according to a set of the predefined categories. After the classification, the relevant tweets are provided to the users as reports. In this paper, we describe the VazaDengue features including its ability to harvest and classify tweets. Since the VazaDengue system aims at providing a dynamic and efficient environment to support rapid interventions of health agents, we present here two studies evaluating the potential contributions of the classified tweets in preventing and combating mosquito-borne diseases. The first evaluation uses a survey conducted by the Brazilian community of health agents. The goal is to evaluate the relevance of the classified tweets. The second study compares the official reports of the 2015-2016 epidemic waves in Brazil with the concentration of mosquito-related tweets found by VazaDengue. The goal is to verify if the concentration of tweets can be used for monitoring big cities. The results of these two evaluations are encouraging. We have found that the health agents tend to agree with the relevance of the classified tweets. Moreover, the concentration of tweets is likely to be effective for monitoring big cities. The results of these evaluations are helping us to further improve the VazaDengue system to make it more useful for combating and preventing the mosquito-borne diseases. VazaDengue: An Information System for Preventing and Combating Mosquito-Borne Diseases with Social Networks:
Author(s): Sousa L, de Mello R, Cedrim D, Garcia A, Missier P, Anderson U, Anderson O, Romanovsky A
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2017
Pages: 36
Print publication date: 01/08/2017
Acceptance date: 02/04/2016
Report Number: 1511
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/media/wwwnclacuk/schoolofcomputingscience/files/trs/1511.pdf
