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i-sense announce major new collaboration with Flusurvey

Home > New and events > I Sense Announce Major New Collaboration Flusurvey

This year, i-sense have awarded Flusurvey, the UK’s biggest crowd-sourced study of influenza, a major round of funding for an exciting new project to help monitor the spread of flu in the UK more accurately and earlier than ever before.

i-sense will combine their innovative mobile and big data technologies with Flusurvey’s online participatory flu monitoring platform flusurvey.org.uk to map trends as soon as seasonal flu takes hold.

Credit: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Flusurvey scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) monitor flu across the UK by analysing weekly information relating to symptoms, provided in an online questionnaire by volunteers. With this new funding Flusurvey will, for the first time, be able to verify this data by offering some of their participants a swab to confirm if their symptoms are caused by a flu virus or not.

The easy to use, self-tests can be done at home- a small swab sample taken from the nose is analysed on a test that works in a similar way to a pregnancy test and the results are shown within minutes. Participants can submit their results by taking a picture on their mobile phone and emailing them as well as posting the test to a PHE laboratory for verification.

Together with scientists from Public Health England (PHE) and UCL, the results of these swabs will be analysed and combined with data from the millions of symptoms reported every day via web searches and social media platforms such as Twitter, providing geographically-linked information and supporting a more accurate picture of influenza-like illnesses in the UK.

Complaints of coughs, colds and flu-like symptoms are a common feature of life at this time of year but not all sniffles are a sign of flu. Verifying cases of a virus (through laboratory testing and self-tests) is a crucial part of efforts to spot a pandemic flu outbreak with the potential to cause serious illness and death, and Flusurvey data feeds into national surveillance programmes.

i-sense researchers at UCL are currently developing an app, which will allow users to read out the results of their tests instantly and send them directly to Flusurvey from their mobile phones.

Professor Rachel McKendry, Director of i-sense and Professor at UCL said:

“This exciting project will identify flu outbreaks much earlier than ever before and help us to develop a new generation of mobile phone-connected tests allowing people to report their symptoms and self-test in their own homes. The mobile phone app being developed will help provide up to the minute information about flu hotspots.”

UK Flusurvey’s coordinator, Clare Wenham, Research Fellow in Public Health Engagement at LSHTM, added:

"Virological swabbing is an exciting development of the Flusurvey project as it is going to allow us to see whether those who report symptoms online actually are suffering from a flu virus or something else entirely. This way we can get a much better understanding of the burden of flu at any one time in the UK"

Researchers are calling for members of the public across the UK to sign up to participate in order to collect as much data as possible to map this year’s flu trends and to help medics and health services prepare. Traditional monitoring methods rely on data from GPs or hospitals, but this project will  provide a unique insight because many people with flu-like illness do not visit a doctor.

This project also benefits from collaboration with the ISI Foundation, who host and manage Influenzanet, the monitoring system used for Flusurvey.

For more information on this new collaboration or how to get involved, see www.flusurvey.org.uk

This project was funded by the i-sense Exploratory Projects Fund. For more information on future funding and collaboration opportunities, please contact Kailey Nolan at k.nolan@ucl.ac.uk

Related links

BMJ Blogs: Clare Wenham and John Edmunds: How effective is this year’s flu vaccine?