mHealth app predicts influenza outbreak a month before national surveillance

Mobile health (mHealth) applications have been able to predict an outbreak of influenza before national surveillance systems in China, according to researchers from Harvard University. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, evaluated nearly 50,000 mobile observations.

Digital health technology has been able to provide large scale surveillance at a low cost, but evidence of effectiveness in predicting an outbreak is lacking. Allowing parents to monitor children’s fever and other illnesses, the Thermia online educational app collected 44,999 observations from January 2014 to July 2016 to include in the study.

This study, led by Yulin Hswen of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children's Hospital, evaluated Thermia data to compare results of predictions of an influenza outbreak.

Results showed that Thermia was able to predict an outbreak a month before China's National Health and Family Planning Commission surveillance system.

“Digital health applications could supplement traditional influenza surveillance systems in China by providing access to consumers’ symptom reporting,” wrote Hswen and colleagues. “Growing popularity and use of commercial digital health applications in China potentially affords opportunities to support disease detection and monitoring and rapid treatment mobilization.”