News and myth – dengue fever

• Main Author: Tan, Ser Han
• Other Authors: Lee Bu Sung
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66421
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project sets out to explore the possibilities of leveraging technology to assist in dengue prevention as well as increase awareness of the uninformed public of the dangers of mosquitoes, the diseases they transmit and news of outbreaks. In Sri Lanka, the general public is not adequately aware of the dangers mosquitoes bring into their lives. This project firstly introduces a prototype news feed which can be quickly customized in any programming language to suit the target location and audience by making use of Google’s news API. This prototype is targeted at bringing breaking news of dengue outbreaks but can be easily adapted for other diseases. In Western Europe, dengue fever has been spreading within countries which just a few decades ago had no incidence of said disease. This project attempts to explain and model the phenomenon with mathematical models in collaboration with a group of researchers. The hypothesis is that dengue is spread into European countries by air travel of infected passengers from dengue endemic countries. This project assists in the large number of calculations as well as the map creation process to better predict and visualize the spikes in dengue cases resulting from air travel importations. Finally, this project also prototypes a desktop app aimed at the non-technical user to quickly model and generate high quality maps based on importation of endemic, contagious diseases via air travel.