IBM develops technology to track spread of disease

Information is power. IBM has developed an advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe to the open source community. This new technology, known as Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM), is designed to enable the rapid creation of epidemiological models for how an infectious disease, such as avian influenza or dengue fever, is likely to geographically spread over time.

Techtree reportsthat STEM will also help scientists and public health officials in understanding and planning more efficient responses to health crises, thus providing new tools for protecting population health.

STEM can run on any operating system, and it creates a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on a variety of parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns, and bird migratory routes around the world. According to the company, STEM represents nearly three years of research spanning the globe with scientists from IBM’s various labs contributing to its creation.

Joseph Jasinski, program director of Healthcare and Life Sciences, IBM, said that “STEM will allow public health officials to model the spread of a disease much like modeling a storm or hurricane. Until now, it wasn’t possible to play out health crisis scenarios on a global scale. STEM gives us the power to do that.”

STEM is one of the key technologies being used in the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort formed by IBM and more than twenty major worldwide public health institutions to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

The software is available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF), hosted at the Ottawa, Ontario-based Eclipse Foundation, the non-profit foundation guiding the Eclipse open source community. STEM can be downloaded at Eclipse’s Web site.