The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently named the “Pandemic Pulse” intuitive dashboard developed by the Computational Epidemiology Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital as the $150,000 grand prize winner of the Hidden Signals Challenge.
Launched in October by the DHS Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) with the Office of Health Affairs National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC), the Hidden Signals Challenge encouraged teams from across the country to design a new early warning system to identify emerging biothreats using existing data sources.
“Through the Hidden Signals Virtual Accelerator, we’ve come to realize we need our platform to be flexible enough to allow for zooming in and panning out at any given moment, as this will increase understanding and therefore trust among our end-users,” Daniel B. Neill, director of the Event and Pattern Detection Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University from the Pre Syndromic Surveillance team, said. “The end-user buy-in is a critical step in development, as an under-utilized platform would have limited public health impact, particularly in times of emergencies.”
Pandemic Pulse consists of an intuitive dashboard that draws from Google search data and social media data to detect biothreat signals. The system is capable of filter data based on categories of pathogens, information sources and transmission mode.
“By exploring these untapped data sources we aim to improve how city-level operators make important public safety decisions,” William Bryan, DHS senior official performing duties of under secretary for science and technology, said. “The grand prize winner and runner-up have strong system designs that harness streams of information in a manner that could allow us to identify an emerging problem faster.”
Receiving a $50,000 runner-up prize was Neill and Mallory Nobles for developing the Pre-syndromic Surveillance tool that uses semantic analysis to identify outbreaks that do not meet criteria of known illness. The system uses data from emergency departments, health clinics, and social media. The team developed a working prototype with the New York City Department of Health.
DHS awarded five finalist teams $20,000 in seed funding in February to advance into the second stage of the competition, a two-month Virtual accelerator that enabled teams to develop and test system designs. The Accelerator offered teams access to seven mentors specializing in different areas of research, design and system implementation.
“These conversations strengthened our understanding of the complexity of how local and national organizations work together to detect and respond to emerging bio-threats,” said John Brownstein, director of the Computational Epidemiology Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital from the Pandemic Pulse team. “This understanding has helped us anticipate the needs of our various end users and consider how we can best scale our system to a national level.”