Tracing patients' PLOD with mobile phones: Mitigation of epidemic risks through patients' locational open data
This addresses privacy and data utility issues in epidemic tracking for public health authorities and residents, but it is incremental as it builds on existing open data and mobile technology.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficient detail in public health location data releases by proposing a structured open data format based on RDF, enabling automated risk estimation for residents using mobile phone location data, with a preliminary evaluation of the specification conducted.
In the cases when public health authorities confirm a patient with highly contagious disease, they release the summaries about patient locations and travel information. However, due to privacy concerns, these releases do not include the detailed data and typically comprise the information only about commercial facilities and public transportation used by the patients. We addressed this problem and proposed to release the patient location data as open data represented in a structured form of the information described in press releases. Therefore, residents would be able to use these data for automated estimation of the potential risks of contacts combined with the location information stored in their mobile phones. This paper proposes the design of the open data based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), and performs a preliminary evaluation of the first draft of the specification followed by a discussion on possible future directions.