A Framework for Dengue Surveillance and Data Collection in Pakistan

Health monitoring through smartphones applications has emerged as a popular and effective practice. Many countries including Pakistan are suffering from a viral disease called Dengue. Dengue is a mosquito-borne single positive-standard RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae. It can be identified from its symptoms, such as skin rashes, fever, headache, and nausea etc. Due to the limited connectivity and availability of information technology services in rural and far-off areas in Pakistan, timely reporting the Dengue incidents to the authorities has been a serious issue. Moreover, currently there does not exist any data about Dengue infected areas and affected patients that hinders the government authorities to timely predict the disease outbreaks. To that end, we propose a framework to collect the information of suspected patients of Dengue through smart phones. The collected information is subsequently transmitted to the doctors and authorities for further necessary measures. A key benefit of the proposed architecture is that it will result in establishing a data repository of Dengue patients that can be further used for Dengue outbreak prediction.