One of the obstacles to accurately estimating the prevalence of sickness in the general population is that most of our data comes from hospitals, not the 99.9 percent of the world that isn’t hospitals. FluSense is an autonomous, privacy-respecting system that counts the people and coughs in public spaces to keep health authorities informed.
Every year has a flu and cold season, of course, though this year’s is of course far more dire. But it’s like an ordinary flu season in that the main way anyone estimates how many people are sick is by analyzing stats from hospitals and clinics. Patients reporting “influenza-like illness” or certain symptoms get aggregated and tracked centrally. But what about the many folks who just stay home, or go to work sick?
We don’t know what we don’t know here, and that makes estimates of sickness trends — which inform things like vaccine production and hospital staffing — less reliable than they could be. Not only that, but it likely produces biases: Who is less likely to go to a hospital, and more likely to have to work sick? Folks with low incomes and no healthcare.
flusense system tracks sickness trends autonomously monitoring public spaces
