Headlines

December 13, 2012
Vaccine Refused, our new project to facilitate data collection from point of refusal, was released in the iTunes App Store for use by U.S. medical professionals.

November 9, 2012
Dr. Philip Polgreen and graduate student Jason Fries were featured on Iowa Public Radio discussing our research on hand hygiene in hospitals. http://news.iowapublicradio.org/post/hospital-acquired-infections

February 1, 2012
Our article The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. During the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic has won the Robert Wood Johnson’s Foundation Most Influential Research Articles of 2011.

March 4, 2011
Check out our new PLoS One article on Twitter and the H1N1 pandemic.

April 21, 2011
A new iScrub article on Infection Control Today (ICT)! iScrub Phone App Pilot Project Boost Hand Hygiene Compliance

April 4, 2011
iScrub in the news! New iPhone application improved hand hygiene compliance

April 1, 2011
CompEpi presented some new research at the 21st Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA 2011) in Dallas, Texas. Read more

December 1, 2010
Our group was well-represented at the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS 2010) in Park City, Utah. Read more

May 4, 2010
Do health care professionals perform hand hygiene? We’ve got an app for that! Read the press release.

March 17, 2010
The Fifth Decennial International Conference on Healthcare Associated Infections advance press release features CompEpi research.

November 5, 2009
CompEpi graduate students Jason Fries, Donald Curtis, and Chris Hlady were winners in the Faculty/Staff/Graduate Assistant Business Plan Competition, hosted by the UI Business College’s John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, where they pitched the next generation iScrub system.

September 9, 2009
iScrub, our new iPhone/iPod Touch application for infection control professionals, is now available online at the Apple iTunes store.

June 18, 2009
Try our Maximal Coverage Calculator for near-optimal placement of sentinel surveillence sites.

More news…

Demo Gallery

SocialNetworkMICU.Description http://vinci.cs.uiowa.edu/~dcurtis/motecg/

The MICU: A Social Network

How do healthcare workers interact with each other on a shift? How often to they see each other? This web-based visualization provides a way to quickly observe how connected certain healthcare worker roles (e.g, nurse, physician) are to each other during the course of a 12-hour shift.

A Day in the Life of the MICU

Watch a Flash animation of healthcare worker movement during a single 12 hour shift in the UIHC’s medical intensive care unit (MICU). This animation was created using real world data obtained from our research into the use of mobile sensor network deployments within hospitals.

Browser-based Maximal Coverage Calculator

In the United States sentinel surveillance for diseases such as seasonal influenza are conducted at the state level by volunteer facilities. Of these volunteers, how do we choose optimally located candidates? Ideal locations are those that cover the most people for the least cost while also capturing disease incidence in a way that accurately reflects the greater whole.

Now with a list of candidate zip codes, you can use our online calculator to determine near-optimal placement of sentinel surveillence sites.

Live Tracking Public Perceptions of H1N1 (Swine Flu) Using Twitter

Try out our real-time web application for tracking public perceptions of swine flu (requires Firefox or Safari; uses 3rd party cookies).

This application is a part of Social Web Information Monitoring for Health, or SWIM for Health, and is being conducted by Alessio Signorini, Director of Search Technology at OneRiot, CompEpi group member, and computer science PhD candidate; also involved are CompEpi group members Philip Polgreen and Alberto Maria Segre.

Syphilis on the Rise 1992-2009

Since 1999 the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of new syphilis cases. Syphilis outbreaks are “sentinel events in community health” and “represent a failure in disease control”. One of the many tragedies of this resurgence is that syphilis is actually a very good candidate for eradication. During the mid-1990′s the disease appeared to finally be on the way out; by 1999 situation began to change dramatically.

Click to watch an interactive animation of state-level syphilis data since 1992 and read more about this issue.

Visualizing Hospital Contact Graphs on a Multi Touch Display

How do healthcare workers move within a hospital? How often do they come into contact with each other? How do we visualize and interact with this information in a way to make it meaningful? Such questions are vitally important when considering how disease spreads and persists within hospital environments.

This video shows how multi touch displays can add meaning to the process of exploring outbreak and contact simulations.