Tracking population trends with technology
1 min read
Researchers are developing computer simulation software that they hope will match the movements of all 300million people in towns across the US.
The team from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) says that the EpiSimdemics software will help them understand the spread of contagious diseases, fads or traffic flows. For example, the programme is able to determine when an epidemic may peak and show when public health intervention is necessary.
The system has been made possible by collating large amounts of publicly available data, mainly from the US Census. The software generated individuals from supplied data and populated them in real US cities.
Each synthetic American possesses as many as 163 variables such as age, education level and occupation. During trials, researchers looked at how contagious diseases, such as a flu epidemic, might spread through different regions. The software infected several synthetic individuals with the flu virus, then tracked them over a period of time. The EpiSimdemics software then calculated different probabilities of responding to the virus depending on the individual’s data. Each ‘person’ and location was treated as a separate set of calculations and it was possible to show a path that the virus took through a population.
While the model currently consists of about 100m Americans, there are plans to simulate the movement of all 300m US residents within the next six months.
