BlueDot is a company at the crossroads of medicine and geography, using big data to look at how infectious diseases spread throughout the world. Geographic information systems, spatial analytics, and data visualization are all integral parts of their goal to model and address health issues around the globe.
They not only monitor human geography, but animal and insect populations as well. They also look at current disease activity, climate conditions, transportation networks, and healthcare systems as factors affecting their predictive modelling.
Here’s what BlueDot had to say to the American Geographical Society:
“At BlueDot we are continuously engaged in exploring innovative, cross-sectoral opportunities to address complex local, regional and global problems. Among other datasets and systems, we use population mobility data, real-time remote sensing data, machine learning, natural language processing, and are working to incorporate crowdsourced data for informal situational awareness and surveillance activities. Much of our work focuses on incorporating spatial tools traditionally reserved for GIS professionals into an accessible web-based environment. This enables public health analysts to perform powerful spatial analytics and make evidence-based decisions without the need for sophisticated, technical GIS skills.”
Before starting BlueDot, Dr. Kamran Khan developed this program at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, in order to study the relationship between emerging infectious diseases and human geography. In 2009, his methods were used to predict the Swine Flu pandemic, the first influenza pandemic of the 21st century. That success was followed by others, and Dr. Khan elected to turn his vision into a social enterprise. Since that time, BlueDot has been featured in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Travel Medicine, publications from the World Health Organizations, the Lancet, and several journals of the Public Library of Science (PLOS).
Written by Jesse Miller, 9/18/2015