The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 6 (Dec 2014) | Page 20

Industry News

IBM Launches Humanitarian
Initiatives to Help Contain Ebola
Outbreak in Africa

Following our Special Report in the last issue of The Journal of
mHealth that looked at the role technology is having in the fight
against Ebola we have recently heard the details of a number
of initiatives from IBM aimed at helping to curb the spread of
Ebola in West Africa.
They include a citizen engagement and analytics system in
Sierra Leone that enables communities affected by Ebola to
communicate their issues and concerns directly to the government; a donation of IBM Connections technology in Nigeria
to strengthen the Lagos State government’s preparedness for
future disease outbreaks; and a global platform for sharing
Ebola-related open data.
The efforts combine expertise from IBM’s global network of
research labs with the company’s years of experience in humanitarian disaster response by applying mobile technology, data
analytics and cloud computing to help governments and relief
agencies as they seek to contain the deadly disease.
The work benefits from contributions from a number of
partners including Sierra Leone’s Open Government Initiative, Cambridge University’s Africa’s Voices project, Airtel and
Kenya’s Echo Mobile.
Citizen Engagement in Sierra Leone
IBM’s new Africa research lab, in collaboration with Sierra
Leone’s Open Government Initiative, has developed a system
that enables citizens to report Ebola-related issues and concerns
via SMS or voice calls. It provides actionable insight to the government about the day-to-day experiences of communities

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directly affected by Ebola to help improve its strategy for containing the disease.
“For us to tackle Ebola, it is crucial to maintain an open dialogue between the government and the people of Sierra Leone,”
said Khadija Sesay Director of Sierra Leone’s Open Government Initiative. “IBM has enhanced our work on citizen engagement through the use of innovative technology and opened up
an effective communication channel with the general public so
that we can learn from their input and create actionable policies
in the fight against Ebola.”
Tapping supercomputing power and analytics capabilities via
the cloud, the system is able to rapidly identify correlations and
highlight emerging issues across the entire data set of messages.
As the SMS and voice data are location specific, IBM is able
to create opinion-based heat-maps which correlate public sentiment to location information.
For example, it has already brought to light specific regions with
growing numbers of suspected Ebola cases which require urgent
supplies like soap and electricity, as well as faster response times
for body collection and burials. The system has also highlighted
issues with the diagnosis of Ebola empowering the government
to approach the international community to request more testing facilities and equipment.
“As Africa’s first technology research lab, we are uniquely positioned to use innovation to help tackle some of the continent’s
biggest challenges,” said Dr. Uyi Stewart, Chief Scientist, IBM
Research – Africa. “We saw the need to quickly develop a sys-