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Sensor Demo Video
 
Latest Sensor System for Congestive Heart Failure Patients

Recent and Upcoming Talks

IRID May 31-June 2, 2011, Bethesda, MD
"Developing effective tools to combat low-level schistosomiasis transmission in Sichuan, China"
 
President's Malaria Initiative June 6-10, 2011, Zanzibar
GIS training for PlasmoTrack Malaria Elimination
 
ISEE September 13-16, 2011, Barcelona, Spain
"Mobile Phones as Personal Environmental Sensing Platforms: Development of the CalFit System"

Mobile Monday October 3, 2011, Techmart, Santa Clara
"You Say You Want A Revolution? Mobile Computing Has Arrived"

Fogerty, CDPH, China October 6-11, 2011, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
"Health Impact Assessment Training"

HIA of the Americas October 17-18, 2011, Oakland, CA
"HIA Methods in the U.S. Since 2008 Practice Standards"
"Rcaline — a tool for assessing transportation-related air pollution equity impacts"
"Supplemental Assessment of AB32, California’s Global Warming Solution Act of 2006: Environmental Health Equity Implications of Traffic-Related Particulate Matter Emissions"

UCLA October 20, 2011, Los Angeles, CA
Guest lecture for "Social Determinants of Nutrition and Health"

APHA October 29-November 2, 2011, Washington, DC
"Food Environment Data Sources in Berkeley, California- A Spatial Analysis of Four Data Sources"

TRUST November 2-3, 2011, Washington, DC
"Sensor Systems for Monitoring Congestive Heart Failure: Location-based Privacy Encodings"

RAPIDD November 15-16, 2011, Atlanta, GA
"Quantification of Fine Scale Human Movement: Revisiting Statistical and Mathematical Approaches”
 
ASTMH December 4-8, 2011, Philadelphia, PA
"Evidence for local malaria transmission in the wet season and imported malaria in the dry season in Zanzibar"

USC March 15, 2012, Los Angeles, CA
"Cumulative health impacts of traffic exposure, and new ways to assess these exposures"

National HIA Meeting April 3-4, 2012, Washington, DC
"HIA Methods Used in United States Practice Since 2009"
"Evaluation of HIA Training and Capacity-building in the United States"
"Impacts of Near Roadway Exposures on Neighborhood Health - Challenges in Choosing Metrics for Use in Community and Regional HIA"

Wireless Health 2012 October 22-25, 2012, San Diego, CA

Smart Elimination of Neglected Diseases (SEND)

 

Contents

  1. 1 Mission
  2. 2 Understanding the problem: Schistosomiasis
  3. 3 Translational research
  4. 4 Evaluating solutions
  5. 5 Support

 

Mission

The mission of the SEND Project is to develop appropriate diagnostic systems to detect and bring about the eventual elimination of neglected tropical diseases in current low transmission regions. SEND recognizes the critical need for an integrative systems approach for disease elimination that relies upon more sensitive diagnostics, as well as information systems that can target areas for surveillance and other control activities. To demonstrate the approach, we are developing a solution for the neglected human parasitic disease, schistosomiasis in China.


Our work focuses on three aims:

  • The development of information systems to track data in real-time to inform planning for disease elimination
  • The development of new culturally appropriate diagnostic tools to detect low-level infection, which are of increasing importance as elimination is being reached.
  • The development of social and environmental indicators of transmission risk, which need to be monitored to achieve elimination.

To address this need, a multi-disciplinary team of public health, electrical engineering, and bioengineering researchers are working to develop, deploy, and evaluate the impact of new technologies at field sites in the developing world.

 
 

Understanding the problem: Schistosomiasis

Schistosomiasis control in Sichuan, China presents a real-world case study for the SEND project.  The province has reached transmission control status (low levels of human and snail infection), and is seeking to achieve sustainable control, and eventually elimination of this waterborne parasitic disease.
The lifecycle above represents the basic transmission process of how the parasite moves between snail and human (or other mamalian hosts) via the environment.  This rather isolated view of the transmission cycle lacks broader ecosystem factors that drive this cycle, including intermediate population dynamics, water and sanitation resources, and human behavioral factors such as exposure and contamination processes.  These processes in turn are related to regional and global processes, such as climate.  Understanding how these factors relate to transmission, and tracking them as transmission indicators, can be extremely useful for disease elimination programming.
 

Translational research

The solutions developed for the SEND project are directly related to active research projects in health informatics, sensing, and point-of-care diagnostics.  The project leverages over a decade of collaborative research on developing effective control policies for neglected tropical diseases through environmental and epidemiologic field studies.  Our research is based on:

  • Technologies appropriate to developing economies (open source and globally accessible technologies): e.g., Open MRS, Android-based devices.
  • New epidemiologic findings from our project area: e.g., quantification of individual-level exposure, evaluation of parasite resistance to drug treatment.
  • New diagnostic tools: e.g., assessing molecular markers of infection via highly sensitive assays

 

Evaluating solutions

Working with local disease control agencies, we will evaluate innovations created in the SEND project.  Our team has chosen a field site near Chengdu in Sichuan, China, where we are deploying SEND technologies.  Already our team has conducted a literature review and is in the process of evaluating ecologic variables from this site that may serve as indicators of ongoing transmission.  Additionally, we are in the process of developing an elimination planning tool -- an open source system for tracking disease incidence and changing ecologic variables. 
 
 

Support

This project is supported by a grant from the Blum Center for Developing Economies.
 
The Principal Investigators of this project are: Edmund Seto, Ruzena Bajcsy, and Amy Herr.