Epi-SPIRE: A system for environmental and public health activity monitoring

Health activity monitoring (HAM) has received increasing attention due to the rapid advances of both hardware and software technologies and strong environmental and public health needs. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of the Epi-SPIRE prototype, which is a novel health activity monitoring system that generates alerts from environmental, behavioral, and public health data sources. A model-based approach is used to develop disease and behavior models from multi-modal heterogeneous data sources. Furthermore, a model-based indexing technique has been developed to speed up the data access and retrieval. This system has been successfully applied to various genuine and simulated diseases outbreaks scenarios'.