Infectious Disease Containment Based on a Wireless Sensor System

Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to public health due to its high infectivity and potentially high mortality. One of the most effective ways to protect people from being infected by these diseases is through vaccination. However, due to various resource constraints, vaccinating all the people in a community is not practical. Therefore, targeted vaccination, which vaccinates a small group of people, is an alternative approach to contain infectious diseases. Since many infectious diseases spread among people by droplet transmission within a certain range, we deploy a wireless sensor system in a high school to collect contacts happened within the disease transmission distance. Based on the collected traces, a graph is constructed to model the disease propagation, and a new metric (called connectivity centrality) is presented to find the important nodes in the constructed graph for disease containment. Connectivity centrality considers both a node’s local and global effect to measure its importance in disease propagation. Centrality based algorithms are presented and further enhanced by exploiting the information of the known infected nodes, which can be detected during targeted vaccination. Simulation results show that our algorithms can effectively contain infectious diseases and outperform other schemes under various conditions.