Smartphones More Accurate, Faster, Cheaper For Disease Surveillance In Developing World

Smartphones are showing promise in disease surveillance in the developing world according to a recent study on influenza surveillance. An influenza surveillance project in Kenya found that data collected with smartphones had fewer errors and were more quickly available for analyses than data collected on paper. Additionally, using smartphones to collect the data was 25% cheaper than traditional paper survey methods to gather disease information. The finding was reported by Henry Njuguna, M.D., sentinel surveillance coordinator at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Kenya in a presentation at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases which took place in . . .