Forecasting the Spread of Air Borne Communicable Diseases

Bridging the Gap with a Real Time Surveillance System

Abstract

Air borne communicable disease can be serious and life threatening. Hence, availability of surveillance systems predicting its potential outbreak can be very useful in its controlling and eradication strategies. The study identified the need for the development of a real time surveillance system which will integrate the time series geo analytic model proposed by (Amoo et al., 2021).  This will thus aid the real-time collection, distribution and analysis of surveillance data about air-borne disease. This was followed by the identification of the parameters that were relevant for reporting and monitoring communicable diseases from the DSNOs using a structured oral interview after which historical data containing disease surveillance data were collected from disease surveillance data archives.

Following this, the design of the real-time communicable disease surveillance system was specified using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams.  Use case diagram was used to specify the design requirements of the users; data flow diagram was used to design the flow of surveillance data while class diagram was used to design the conceptual data model of air-borne diseases surveillance system. The real-time communicable diseases surveillance system will thus provide a means via which communicable diseases data can be captured, stored, analyzed and accessed easily from a single cloud-based repository by a variety of computing devices ranging from PCs to smartphones there by removing the gap facing accessibility to information by stakeholders.  The disease mapping capacity of the system will allow stakeholders to monitor the distribution of communicable diseases across various reporting locations thereby providing accurate report of the public health status of the country. This thus provides a means of adopting evacuation and control measures towards reducing the likely spread of communicable diseases to vulnerable neighbouring locations. Future works is focused on the implementation of the real time surveillance system for air borne communicable diseases based on the proposed conceptual design.