The software vendor, IBM, has developed an advanced software technology, which will make easier to track the transmission of diseases around the world to the open source and public health communities. IBM’s software can quickly create an epidemiological model for how an infectious disease, like bird flu, is likely to geographically spread over time based on certain parameters including population, road maps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world.
The software is known as, Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM), which is available through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF), hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, the non-profit foundation that guides the Eclipse open source community. Public health agencies and software developers in local communities can customize the models. The tool will help scientists and public health officials in understanding and planning more efficient responses to health crises. STEM is three years of global research including contributions from scientists from IBM’s Almaden, Haifa and Watson labs. STEM has following features:
1) It can run on any operating system: STEM is available on an open source, so communities can work together to build models and respond to emerging epidemics.
2)Tracking Around the World: A basic epidemiological model framework will be provided to public health agencies and software developers, who can customise and configure the models based on their specific geographic, health and relevant macroeconomic issues.
3)Plug-In Contributions: Users would be able to share the customizes epidemiological models they create as well as the plug-ins they build using Eclipse.
Joseph Jasinski, IBM program director said,
STEM allows public health officials to model the spread of a disease much like modeling a storm or hurricane — it’s like a health weather map. Until now, it wasn’t possible to play out health crisis scenarios on a global scale. STEM gives us the power to do that.
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Via: Money Control
