I was contacted by eHealth, the organisation in charge of the 117 ebola call centre in Sierra Leone to see how intelligence from mobile networks could be used to improve the operational response and analytical insights of the fight against ebola in Sierra Leone and beyond.

My work involved a number of technical and communications challenges. Primarily this involved establishing data exchange protocols with the incumbent mobile operators, such that subscriber call logs could be used to ascertain the cell site used to place a call to the 117 hotline. These data were then married up with call detail logs (CDRs) from the call logs from the call centre database in order to classify the nature and outcome of each ebola-related call.

These data were then combined to create a full event log allowing us to produce interactive heatmaps of ebola progression over time in the region and to cluster events by type (suspected cases, confirmed cases, deaths etc). The information was insightful in both confirming/expanding upon existing epidemic progression analysis, but also opened possibilities in terms of using similar data in future in order to help streamline the data collection needed to shed light on the rapid geographic progression of a virus throughout a region.

Some of my work on this subject was published in the proceedings of Humanitarian Technology 2015 Conference, the paper of which may be found here.

The presentation slides to this conference (our paper was presented by Co-Author Peter Eyres) can be found here.