Agent-Based Modeling for Evaluation of a Wearable-Sensor-Based Disease Surveillance Network

• Activity Number: 140 - Disease Outbreak and Modeling Applications in Defense and National Security
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 8, 2022 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security
• Author(s): Ivan Stanish* and Joseph D Warfield and Jane E. Valentine and Damon C Duquaine and Ariel M. Greenberg and James P. Howard
• Companies: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and John Hopkin University Applied Physics Lab and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
• Keywords: agent-based model; trade-space; syndromic surveillance; wearable sensors

Abstract

Current influenza surveillance practices rely on syndromic surveillance and confirmed influenza case counts, aggregated at the care-provider level and reported to public health agencies. These systems rely on symptomatic individuals seeking medical care, and the intake, diagnosis, aggregation, and reporting steps introduce delays. We propose a novel human sentinel network (HSN) for bio-surveillance, comprising a network of individuals outfitted with wearable sensors capable of detecting illness pre-symptomatically, and rapidly deployed diagnostic tests to confirm or deny infection by specific pathogens; alerts and test results would be aggregated in near-real-time via a cloud-based network. We use an Agent-Based Model to model both the HSN and current surveillance practices to evaluate the potential performance of such a system. We introduce a novel measure of network coverage, characterize the performant trade-space, and perform sensitivity analyses to identify the most critical network characteristics. Results indicate that for a network covering more than ~5% of the population, the HSN can identify the onset of the influenza season 5 – 14 days earlier than current practices.