Illness Tracking in Travellers (ITIT)
This is a 4 year, Swiss National Science Foundation funded project called “Illness Tracking in Travellers”. The project will look at infections in travellers, focussing on mosquito-borne viruses, and detecting outbreaks of travel-related illnesses using a mobile app and daily symptom questionnaires linked with location and climate data. The project is run by the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute of the University of Zürich, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, and the European EuroTravNet network, with app development by Antavi GmbH
Traveller participation will be encouraged with features such as pop-up windows that provide information on common travel , following “WHO International Travel and Health” advice. This research will define infectious disease profiles of travellers by age, sex, purpose of travel, location, climate and environmental factors and will pave the way for personalized travel health advice. It will revolutionize surveillance by allowing bottom-up reporting of illness symptoms by travellers, enabling the follow-up of long-term effects of arboviral infections.
EBPI Team:
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Patricia Schlagenhauf
PhD Candidate: MMed. Thibault Lovey
PhD Candidate: Nadja Hedrich, MSc Epi
App Development:
Dr. Ulf Blanke
Dr. Ulf Blanke has a background in machine learning for understanding human behavior from sensors. He obtained his PhD by TU Darmstadt and held scientific positions at Max Planck Institute, AGT international (R&D) and ETH-Zürich. During the past 10 years he has been actively driving the research agenda as editor and various committee chairs in the mobile, Internet of Things, and SmartCity research community.
He is Cofounder of TwoSense, Inc. based in New York focusing on behavioral biometrics from mobile sensors and the ETH-Z spin off Antavi GmbH, which offers a mobile platform for managing large groups of people in crisis management, mHealth applications, and event management.
WHO Collaborators:
MD MPh MBA. Carmen Dolea: Head of Unit, International Health Regulations Secretariat, WHO Health Emergencies Preparedness and IHR | WHO Health Emergencies Programme
Kevin Crampton: Business Analyst, Information Management and Technology
MD, MSc Mika Kawano: Border Risk Dissemination
ETH Collaborators:
Prof. Dr. Effy Vayena
Dr. Agata Ferretti
