BackgroundZika virus has created a major epidemic in Central and South America, especially in Brazil, during 2015–16. The infection is strongly associated with fetal malformations, mainly microcephaly, and neurological symptoms in adults. During the preparation of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games in 2016, members of Olympic Delegations worldwide expressed their concern about the health consequences of being infected with Zika virus. A major risk highlighted by the scientific community was the impact on the spreading of the virus into new territories immediately after the Games.ObjectivesTo detect real-time incidence of symptoms compatible with arboviral diseases and other tropical imported diseases among the Spanish Olympic Delegation (SOD) attending the Rio Olympic Games in 2016.MethodsWe developed a surveillance platform based on a mobile application installed in participant’s smartphones that monitored the health status of the SOD through a daily interactive check of the user health status including geo-localization data. The results were evaluated by a study physician on-call through a web-based platform monitoring system. Participants presenting severe symptoms or those compatible with Zika infection prompted an alarm in the system triggering specialized medical assistance and allowing early detection and control of the introduction of arboviral diseases in Spain.Summary of the resultsThe system was downloaded by 189 participants and used by 143 of them (76%). Median age was 38 years (IQR 16), and 134 (71%) were male. Mean duration of travel was 19 days (+/-9SD). During the Games the highest accumulated incidence observed was for headache: 6.06% cough: 5.30% and conjunctivitis: 3.03%. The incidence rate of cough during the Olympic Games was 1.1% per day per person, followed by headache 0.8% and 0.4% conjunctivitis or diarrhea. In our cohort we observed that non-athletes experienced more incidence of symptoms, except for incidence of cough which was the same in the two groups (1.1%). No participants reported symptoms fulfilling Zika definition case.ConclusionOur system did not find cases fulfilling Zika definition amongst participants of the SOD during the Games, consistent with limited cases of Zika in Rio during the Games. The app showed good usability and the web based monitoring platform allowed to manage infectious cases in real-time. The overall system has proven to serve as a real-time surveillance platform for detecting symptoms that could be present in tropical imported diseases, especially arboviral diseases, contributing to the preparedness for the introduction of vector borne-diseases in non-endemic countries.
Trip Doctor®, a Smartphone-based app monitoring system, was developed to detect infections among travelers in real-time. For testing, 106 participants were recruited (62.2% male, mean age 36 years (SD = 11)). Majority of trips were for tourism and main destinations were in South East Asia. Mean travel duration was 14 days (SD = 10). Diarrhea was the most frequently reported symptom (15.5%). The system demonstrated adequate usability and is ready to be used on a larger scale.
Background: Citizen science games are a type of Games with a Purpose (GWAPs), whose aim is to harness the skills of volunteers for solving scientific problems or contributing to action projects, where citizens intervene in social concerns. Employing games to collect data, classify images or even solve major scientific problems is a relatively new but growing phenomenon in citizen science. A main concern in citizen science is to ensure data quality. As games can be seen as having adverse effects on data quality, it is important to understand how citizen scientists produce data using games, how accurate this data can be, and whether and how games influence data quality. Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of individual players’ data quality in MalariaSpot, a citizen science casual game in which volunteers are tasked with detecting parasites in digitized blood sample images.Methods: We used descriptive statistics to analyze a subset of the gameplays recorded and stored in the MalariaSpot database, comparing its clicks to the Gold Standard position of the parasites. This subset includes 15,546 gameplays played over 38 known images that correspond to 97,200 clicks from 1,278 different players. Gameplays have been played via the Android and iOS applications and via the web version of the game. Images were acquired in three different locations and therefore sample preparation have been done by different lab technicians. Two distinct technologies were used for sample digitalization.Results: The overall values for sensibility, specificity, and accuracy of the individual gameplays for the 38 images are 0.82, 0.60, and 0.29 respectively. High presence of parasites in an image makes it easier for players to detect them as their structures tend to look alike and can be compared. Being a simple casual game, the learning curve is very fast and after few minutes, players attend their typical performance level. Data quality is considerably lower in images acquired with mobile phones coupled to the microscope ocular compared to those digitized with standardized digitalization technologies. Conclusions: The results indicate that data quality is influenced by the game, the technologies for image digitalization and the sampling preparation.
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