Global flu view: a platform to connect crowdsourced disease surveillance around the world

Abstract

Purpose: Participatory disease surveillance actively engages the public in reporting on symptoms of their health to provide community-level data that complements traditional healthcare-based surveillance. Participatory surveillance is timely, low-cost, can account for non-medically attended populations, and allows for direct engagement with local populations. Three examples of participatory surveillance systems – Flu Near You in North America, Influenzanet in Europe, and Flu Tracking in Australia and New Zealand – have recently collaborated to develop Global Flu View, a shared platform for aggregation and dissemination of crowdsourced data on influenza-like illness. Methods & Materials: The collaborating surveillance systems have developed a shared application programming interface (API) for data exchange among systems. The API specifications outline specific variables that are called into a shared, cloud-based database. Data is processed via an ETL layer resulting in aggregate data at the postcode level. Key variables include reporting week, postal and country codes, user birth month and birth year, gender, vaccination status, and a series of symptom variables that include fever, cough, sore throat, headache, fatigue, and other indications of influenza-like illness. Processed data will be available to view in both graph and map formats on the website www.globalfluview.org. Results: The Global Flu View platform connects community-level influenza surveillance efforts across 15 countries on 3 continents. Tens of thousands of weekly reports are made available for users to explore through graphs, maps, and various filtering tools. The Global Flu View database also serves as a repository of influenza surveillance data that can be shared with disease modelers, researchers, and epidemiologists around the world. Conclusion: Global Flu View can highlight the value of the participatory surveillance approach, serving as a model for other countries. The platform is poised to incorporate data from additional countries with similar tools and serves as a case study for collaborative, multi-country data sharing for global health surveillance. As of July 2018 the platform is in beta-testing mode and will be made publicly available by late August 2018.