RAPID: Remote Monitoring of Ebola Patients and Their Treating Physicians

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Proposal #: 15-14626PI(s): Papanikolopoulos, Nikolaos; Lim, Kelvin O.Institution: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UMN)Title: RAPID: Remote Monitoring of Ebola Patients and Their Treating Physicians Project Proposed:This project, melding proven technologies, aims to assist in an immediate challenge now facing those engaged in direct patient care in the ongoing Ebola epidemic. Namely, employing interactive machine vision technologies and intelligently encoded protective gear to proactively assist health care providers (e.g., adhering to their required NIH/CDC (Center for Disease Control) Safety Procedures-the explicit movement sequences required for the proper donning of sterilized, protective coverings, and afterwards for the safe, step-wise and controlled removal and subsequent disposition of these now potentially lethal items). The crucial importance of this very high standard was underscored recently by the infection of two Dallas-area nurses where protocols were thought breached, and then by the CDC?s response, which next imposed an enhanced buddy system to better ensure future compliance. Notwithstanding, human monitors can sometimes lapse, especially when procedures become routine, as time pressures mount. Fortunately, incorporating respective lessons learned in the creation of an automated and interactive buddy is a readily achievable next step, given the advances in automated human activity and gesture recognition, with experience of the strict procedures evolved in conjunction with tele-operational assistance methods for domains such as surgery, and with modern graphical and human-friendly man-machine interfaces. Obviously, this new knowledge serves a useful purpose.Broader Impacts:The relatively low cost in the longer term should be noted. Even portable extensions to any environment can be disproportionally costly or even catastrophic, particularly when participants fail to adhere to strict standards (usually tedious and unwelcome). In industry (e.g., clean rooms, nuclear sites, etc.), in medicine (e.g., operating theaters), in the military, and in some research areas, the cost of recording and registering sessions that compel the full compliance to required safety measures might easily be offset by better outcomes, fewer accidents and reduced insurance rates. This project contributes in building a coalition of large NSF awardees to jointly address public health problems of national and global significance using the state of the art in Computer Science. The UMN team will assist in the urgent data collection regarding the effectiveness of the protective gear used in Ebola-infected regions.This research will enable the development of new quantitative crisis maps to approximate local regional rates of infectious Ebola virus spreading in near real time thereby enhancing the effective distribution of limited availability of recently developed vaccines to mitigate the spread of Ebola. Furthermore, it will provide a mechanism for validating and improving operational forecast models of the CDC by comparisons with regional social media observations. It may allow for disease surveillance and early detection among our third world countries. Moreover, this project is expected to be generalizable to other infectious virus conditions; the research enables exploiting social media health data from future hand held devices. Although enough speculation exists about the role of the gear, little data is available to push for changes in the protocols or the gear itself. Beyond the present issue of Ebola, the proposed methodology and the coalition building effort will support solutions in a wide range of public health issues.