ad-free
Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-06-09
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRK7KKQH9Ck
hello everybody I'd like to begin by asking you to please take out your mobile phones now I know it's not a request that you'll be also the beginning of many tools normally a rust put them away but please don't be shy take them out hold them up quite a lot of wrestling but already I can see that virtually everyone in this room house a mobile phones
now in the palm of your hands is essentially a small personal super computer yes even the oldest models have more number crunching power than the entire NASA mission but fast put mine on the me today I'm going to tell you about our research which aims to harness the power of digital technologies to build a global early warning system to prevent deadly viruses from spreading around the
world so why is this needed well infectious diseases rank among the gravest threats to human health alongside global warming and terrorism tiny invisible viruses and bacteria all always changing always mutating always evolving they also have a remarkable ability to spread from one person to another to another they can in fact young and old rich and poor black and whites in fat all races and all nations
are susceptible when it comes to infectious diseases it's not them enough it's us we're in it together now the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a stop for my into of the challenge of containing a contagious disease in our increasingly interconnected world it also highlights the vital role of public health and the urgent need for better public health says now while an individual Tulsa will
do their very best to treat the patients that are in front of them they might be on the way of similar cases in other towns or not the parts of the country that's the role of public health and then mission is to protect populations we're talking about much larger numbers of people and they look persons of disease but the best way to prevent a thief disease
from spreading is to detect it early axles announces why these incredibly brave men and women went to West Africa to the source of the about our outbreak they risk their own lives so that we the world could be protected from the risk of Ebola but the sad reality is that many countries developing countries have little public health infrastructure so we bolo went undetected for three months
smoldering I want it was diagnosed it was primed to explode now why the bola is terrible and Edwin virus is a much greater threat in nineteen eighteen a new form if influenza spread around the world in tying the apple and drop sets it infected a third of the world's population killing fifty million people that's more people than World War one now over the last century we've
seen tremendous advances in modern medicine and public health they brought us anti both taking one to drugs a bomb Steig gnostic technologies shown in the lab here and vaccines and each of these advances us contributed to the tremendous gains in life expectancy that we've seen but today in twenty fifteen pandemic influenza remains of the very tall of all governments risk right just a it's not a
case of if a new strain will have much but when because they have a large fire not to process the revolving now the human consequences could be devastating estimate suggests that millions of people could die here in the UK but see element of fear of a considerable a humanitarian a social and economic and the global security crisis when the pandemic emerges no more life ceases to
exist people stop going to work stop going on buses and trains they stopped going to school this means borders Kubota's kind clothes and essential services can fail so the economic impact alone could put all banking crisis to prospective now thankfully pandemic Sicko relatively infrequently but each and every day in doctors offices across the country ought ought to find it increasingly difficult to treat bacterial infections but
once with treatable G. two antimicrobial resistance and Hey you can see the drug pipeline has dried to a trickle Sally Davis our chief medical officer called this a ticking time bomb and highlighted the need not just a better run the Baltics but for better public health systems across the world to prevent these disease epidemic happening in the first place now in all cases early detection plays
a crucial role and we typically rely on accurate diagnostic tests because these inform the correct intervention should we give someone an antibiotic or should we isolate them I here in the UK we have one of the best public health systems in the world and they rely on looking up diagnostic tests results from those the bart trees but even that we can see their inherent delays between
the exposure of a virus I'm receiving a confirmed diagnosis so let's look more closely at what happens you typically if someone's exposed to an infection Libyan incubation period Belleville feel quite fine then symptoms will begin it could be a sore throat a cough FIFA the bus would typically still trying continue their normal life going to visit my friends going to work going to school each time
there's a risk that they could possibly harm to someone around them at some point the stop telling people that they're not feeling well looking for information left the radio on while the visits a doctor or hospital and at this point samples taken and it can be sent talked to a diagnostic lab there were further time delays they between waiting for the results to come as sending
them back a follow up appointments and it's only then that the correct interventions can be given so we've got this time delay between exposure and diagnosis and it leads to missed opportunities to give people the right treatment when they first turned up at the doctor and often the Rome treatments a given for example antibiotics to treat a viral infection but this time delay has serious consequences
some public health efforts to prevent this disease spread of disease seventy two weeks but dial up between exposure and the diagnosis for flu and in that time a strain like a person could have jumped on a plane traveled around the world remember it took three months to diagnose it by Allah so this and that it needs to turn back the clock and to try to pick
up infections Darren then when people visit that doctors or even at the onset of symptoms and these compelling clinical needs inspired me to bring together a truly fantastic team river such as to build a twenty first century early warning system to prevent the spread diseases so we're harnessing the millions of symptoms are reported on the web each day I'm linking these to a new generation of
mobile phone connected tests our aim is to strengthen existing public health system so we're linking to look them to love our tree test data but these methods could also bring a new generation of public health infrastructure to developing countries hip hop who don't have them at the moment so the team is fantastic we got chemists physicists engineers computer scientists epidemiologists medics Arledge's microbiologists from five UK
universities the NHS public health England and industry and we're all passionate about building but better public health systems we're taking advantage of the digital revolution it's here it's a reality today there are seven billion mobile phone subscriptions that's more than the number of people on the planet some might argue that spreading faster than viruses but it takes a side we see incredibly high levels of use
in developing countries and in fact they can be the single most of vomits technology in some remote villages now we've also seen Hoff of the world's population is now online so if everyone with the phone or computer time the bomb it would be a digital map of the human rights and many of us don't leave home without them now one of the first examples of the
use of web technology to identify out racist attitudes on a thousand and three when the pro med internet reporting system shape this post it's talking about unlike Adamic in China and he can see have you heard from our of an epidemic in going south an acquaintance of mine from a teacher's chat room lives there reports the hospitals that have been closed and people are dying that
was the first public reports of a disease that later became known to the world as saws it didn't come from a government it didn't come from the World Health Organization it came from an individual member of the public and it shows the power of the individual to identify outbreaks the official reports came several weeks later but mobile phones have changed enormously since two thousand and three
in fact they've changed since nineteen seventy three when the first phone call was made in the month I was born every year the components and often have got smaller I got foster and it's become cheaper to send and receive information I thought I find it incredible that today the smallest feature on your smartphone smaller than a virus and these technologies can be made at a price
that's affordable to all of us but this is changing the way we live it's changing the way we work and it is changing the way we learn now this morning many if you will of Churchill finds within fifteen minutes of waking up during the day you'll check it several tens maybe hundreds of times some of you might be checking it during my Ted took a bus
now phones of overtaken fixed terminals is the main way we set for information and indeed eighty percent of us such online for information about all health now Google a share in that you can take those search queries anonymizing grouped them to detect outbreaks of flu like illnesses two weeks before traditional public health efforts this is them locking system which is available online fuel to see and
we're working with Google now to improve the modeling that underpins the analysis of this data and developing flu trends for the UK for the first time we're also harnessing the power of social media each day millions of people send tweets about their health not not everyone who tweets about flu house flea that often tweeting about people around them but we see more tweets about flu like
illnesses during flu season and we can combine both such data on social media data to create a real time mapping system to now cost outbreaks across the UK Assam when they occur now we're applying this to flute but it's a platform technology that can be extended to other disease areas I would beginning of projects with an ethics and ethics project with members of the public to
look at the wire to issues of data privacy and data security in order to responsibly develop these technologies for public health but symptoms onto diagnosis into diseases can check Coleman Simpson's so accurate diagnostics remains the cornerstone of our early warning system now our aim is to bring diagnostics out of those low bar trees and two whether needed to people so the doctor can give a test
results in a single visit or even ordinary people like us contest in our own homes or Paris parents stats contest their loved ones and this is part of a growing trend in the empowerment of patients so it includes the use of home diabetes monitoring devices I'm wearable technologies such as the apple watch we can measure your impulse right this is the project a pilot study we've
begun with fleas that day where thousands of people a sending us the symptoms of flu like illnesses each week it's seven hundred been tests sense self swapping kicks to the home when they have symptoms of flu like illnesses we ask them to take a cotton bud and cycle sample from the nose puppet in the Steve and send it back to it in the post office and
we can analyze the results in the lab to see what viruses circulating and it is a great example of the use of public of public the public track outbreaks but we can go one step further and we're using the census a crams into the phones to give diagnosis Darren then and to connect the results into our early warning system he can see an upset with developing
to read out commercial test results now these tasks work in much the same way as a pregnancy test way you look for a line and if the line is presently how fleet now the humanize very sensitive but can be quite difficult to read out these faint lines so we're letting smart on camera do the hard work for us and at the click of a button and
image can be analyzed stored and sent in to our early warning sensing system in real time with geographically linked information but we can go one step further a making creasing the complicated tests but look up panels of by a marked as such a different viruses and he can see an example where we've created the bio barcodes and in much the same way as a supermarket scanner
scans of shopping with a bar code in your shopping we can use a smartphone camera to analyze this ball code and immediately were also working with industry partners and his an example of a bullet tronic test well we've taken a tiny chip that's already found in your phone call to surface acoustic wave sensa we've Taylor today to diagnose a virus in the state haste hi Vicki
now if a patient above a finger prick a patient's blood contains the virus it would generate an electronic signal on this check which can be sent to the phone via Bluetooth gain in all cases well harnessing the mobile computing power of phones and the ability to send and receive the data in real time which geographically linked information but another early morning sensing system must be linked
to a rapid follow up response so we're working with the NHS and international healthcare providers create that link so that someone kinda gets follow up appointments immediately am o'connor even be sent a prescription for that fire and in some cases one of the most exciting need to balance is if this collaboration with the Africa center for health and population studies it's located in Durban South Africa
it's one of the poorest parts of South Africa and it's also the epicenter of the hate Tybee pandemic but even here there are surprisingly high levels of mobile phone usage the not smart phones but the coming and that's the price continues to drop we think will say that trends continue and they'll be much more widely available and in recent months we've seen an unprecedented use of
mobile technologies in the fight against Ebola text alerts are being used to get up to the minute information and people to people in the bowler affected areas mobile phones and tablets of being issued to healthcare workers to connect which results from the field to central labs phone locations are being used to map ten chill out breaks eye contact tracing to identify those of potential risks of
infection to conclude the world needs better public health systems so that next time a virus emerges with Bessa for Pat and it will come where you just beginning to see the power of digital technologies but it's clear they do show promise to help patients populations and it's their widespread use and low cost which could help to provide better public health systems across the world wouldn't it
have been incredible if we could have detected a bowler three months earlier when it first emerged in those tiny villages at the heart of this public health system a digital public health system public but you and you and Jay and may so I urge you to get better informed about infectious diseases cheio data connect your results and together we can fight infectious diseases I kid
