Marino Gatto’s team won the 2015 D4D award
April 14th, 2015
Abstract
On April 10th, 2015 Marino Gatto, (Team leader, DEIB-Politecnico di Milano), Lorenzo Mari, Manuela Ciddio, Renato Casagrandi together with Susanne Sokolow and Giulio de Leo (Stanford University), won the D4D (Data for Development) Senegal Challenge award for the "Health" sector, with the research entitled "Uncovering the impact of human mobility on schistosomiasis via mobile phone data". In addition the team has been awarded one of the three Development Grants funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to projects that could have tangible impacts and progress towards an implementation phase.
The aim of the 'Data For Development Senegal' Challenge, promoted by Orange and Sonatel under the patronage of the Senegal Ministry of Higher Education and Research, was to contribute to the development and welfare of the Senegalese populations via Big Data open innovation. The challenge featured five core questions and themes relating to health, agriculture, transportation/urban planning, energy and national statistics. The DEIB team used the Orange data to infer large-scale human mobility patterns and to inform a country-wide network model of schistosomiasis transmission in Senegal. Schistosomiasis is directly responsible for about 12,000 and co-factor of at least 200,000 deaths annually all over the world.The results of the project show that a relatively simple model can quite reliably reproduce regional patterns of schistosomiasis prevalence (that is the percentage of infected people). Mobility is found to play an important role in disease spread, as it can either increase or decrease transmission risk -- with the latter effect being predominant at large spatial scales. The modeling tools developed in the project can be used to assess (and possibly optimize) the effects of country-wide control strategies aimed at reducing the burden of the disease. This represents a first step towards the implementation of a quantitative decision-support tool to help eradicate schistosomiasis from Senegal, with clear benefits to the population at risk of infection.
The conceptual model developed by the DEIB-Politecnico di Milano - Stanford University team can be applied to the study of the spread of many other infectious diseases.
Further information is available at http://www.orange.com/en/press
The aim of the 'Data For Development Senegal' Challenge, promoted by Orange and Sonatel under the patronage of the Senegal Ministry of Higher Education and Research, was to contribute to the development and welfare of the Senegalese populations via Big Data open innovation. The challenge featured five core questions and themes relating to health, agriculture, transportation/urban planning, energy and national statistics. The DEIB team used the Orange data to infer large-scale human mobility patterns and to inform a country-wide network model of schistosomiasis transmission in Senegal. Schistosomiasis is directly responsible for about 12,000 and co-factor of at least 200,000 deaths annually all over the world.The results of the project show that a relatively simple model can quite reliably reproduce regional patterns of schistosomiasis prevalence (that is the percentage of infected people). Mobility is found to play an important role in disease spread, as it can either increase or decrease transmission risk -- with the latter effect being predominant at large spatial scales. The modeling tools developed in the project can be used to assess (and possibly optimize) the effects of country-wide control strategies aimed at reducing the burden of the disease. This represents a first step towards the implementation of a quantitative decision-support tool to help eradicate schistosomiasis from Senegal, with clear benefits to the population at risk of infection.
The conceptual model developed by the DEIB-Politecnico di Milano - Stanford University team can be applied to the study of the spread of many other infectious diseases.
Further information is available at http://www.orange.com/en/press
