Assessing Commitment and Reporting Fidelity to a Text Message-Based Participatory Surveillance in Rural Western Uganda.
Syndromic surveillance, the collection of symptom data from individuals prior to or in the absence of diagnosis, is used throughout the developed world to provide rapid indications of outbreaks and unusual patterns of disease. However, the low cost of syndromic surveillance also makes it highly attractive for the developing world. We present a case study of electronic participatory syndromic surveillance, using participant-mobile phones in a rural region of Western Uganda, which has a high infectious disease burden, and frequent local and regional outbreaks. Our platform uses text messages to encode a suite of symptoms, their associated durations, and household disease burden, and we explore the ability of participants to correctly encode their symptoms, with an average of 75.2% of symptom reports correctly formatted between the second and 11th reporting timeslots. Concomitantly we identify divisions between participants able to rapidly adjust to this unusually participatory style of data collection, and those few for whom the study proved more challenging. We then perform analyses of the resulting syndromic time series, examining the clustering of symptoms by time and household to identify patterns such as a tendency towards the within-household sharing of respiratory illness.
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
James
J
Lester
Department of Pathobiological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America.|Global Health Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America.
Sarah
S
Paige
Department of Anthropology and McGill School of Environment, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; and Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, New York, United States of America.
Colin A
CA
Chapman
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Mhairi
M
Gibson
Department of Anthropology, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States of America.
James
J
Holland Jones
Laboratory Branch, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, National Center for HIV, Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, United States of America.
William M
WM
Switzer
Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States of America.
Nelson
N
Ting
Department of Pathobiological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America.|Global Health Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America.
Tony L
TL
Goldberg
Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Simon D W
SD
Frost
D000293:Adolescent; D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology*; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods; D062486:Public Health Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D012424:Rural Population; D060145:Text Messaging / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013997:Time Factors; D014454:Uganda / Q000453:epidemiology