Bridging Vital Signs and Social Interactions for Resource Constrained Epidemic Control

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach that uses people's social interaction behavior collected by mobile phones and vital signs collected by wireless body area networks (WBAN) for epidemic control. By this approach, infectious people who are socially active can be quickly identified to be quarantined. To realize this approach, we introduce a notion of critical network and critical node identification algorithm. Observing some resource constraints such as quarantine cost and hardware limitation, we focus on optimizing the proposed approach such that high epidemic control effectiveness is achieved while the corresponding overhead is minimized. Our simulation results demonstrate that our approach can effectively control the spread of epidemic diseases in various situations.