An app to monitor flu symptoms and vaccine effectiveness among health workers.
The FLUMOB app is a novel, integrateed digital syndromic and laboratory testing surveillance system to evaluate influenza vaccine effectiveness amongst healthcare workers in a hospital setting. This system will blend the ubiquitous access to the interent, and the simple portability of mobile phones to create a digitally integrated syndromic surveillance system. Our system integrates a web-based interface and a mobile interface that is made available to healthcare workers (HCW) using the various types of mobile devices. The ease and convenience in using App software on their mobile phones will allow users to provide reports of non-specific syndromes such as influenza like illness (ILI) on a weekly bases. Using this information in combination with influenza vaccination status data, vaccine effectiveness estimates against symdromes such as ILI will be derived in near real time. The near real time data generated from our system will be invaluable compared to current healthcare and laboratory based systems. Through the collection of other varibales, it will also allow us to identify risk factors associated with acute respiratory infections such as ILI amongst HCW to inform future prevention guidelines.