Using Absence-Causing Symptoms to Monitor Child Health

利用缺勤症状来监测儿童健康状况

• 批准号: 7497109
• 负责人: David Kirsh
• 金额: $ 18.93万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-09-14 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7497109
• 关键词: Absenteeism; Accident and Emergency department; Address; Artificial Intelligence; Asthma; Bioterrorism; Caring; Child; Child health care; Chronic Disease; Cognitive; Communicable Diseases; Communities; Community Health; Computers; Daily; Data; Data Sources; Development; Disease Outbreaks; Education; Educational Materials; Emergency Situation; Emerging Communicable Diseases; Environment; Environmental Hazards; Epidemic; Evaluation; Event; Exanthema; Face; Family; Fever; Goals; Head Nurses; Health; Health Benefit; Health Technology; Healthcare Systems; Home environment; Hour; Incentives; Informatics; Internet; Interview; Just-in-time-concept; Laboratory Study; Learning; Medical Surveillance; Modification; Monitor; Natural Disasters; Nausea; Nursing Schools; Occupational Health Nursing; Parents; Personal Satisfaction; Persons; Policies; Population; Primary Schools; Procedures; Process; Productivity; Public Health; Public Health Schools; Questionnaires; Readiness; Recreation; Reporting; Research; Research Personnel; Resources; School Nursing; Schools; Science; Scientist; Self Care; Sensitivity and Specificity; Signal Transduction; Site; Students; Symptoms; Syndrome; System; Technology; Telephone; Telephone Interviews; Terrorism; Testing; Time; Today; Toxin; Validation; Voice; Work; base; design; elementary school; experience; hazard; high school; improved; multidisciplinary; new technology; novel; novel strategies; programs; research study; response; school health; social; speech processing; syndromic surveillance; tool; voice recognition

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): On any given weekday, more than one-fifth of the U.S. population is in schools. While we all want schools to be safe places-havens for learning-schoolchildren today face serious health threats including bioterrorism. In the proper project, we will develop and evaluate a system called ASIAN (Absenteeism-causing Symptom-Level Assessment Network), designed to monitor the health of children in schools. Our system focuses on monitoring children's school attendance, because most experts agree that absenteeism from school is an early sign of an outbreak in a community. However, school absenteeism is not a precise sign of an outbreak or epidemic. Absenteeism is often not even related to illness, reflecting, instead, problems in the child's home environment, important social or cultural obligations, and even opportunities for family recreation. But what if a system could identify absences due to illnesses and collect data on the symptoms causing the illness-related absences? Such a system might well offer an early, highly specific signal of an illness in a population, allowing public and school health officials to detect outbreaks in schools very early in their course. We propose to develop a VoiceXML speech processing system that can accurately capture during a brief telephone interview the symptoms a person is experiencing that are causing an absence. We propose to modify the "work processes" school districts use to have parents or guardians report that their children will be absent from school. Parents will use the interactive voice response questionnaire (or a web site, if they prefer) to report (on a voluntary basis) the symptoms that are causing the child's absence. We believe that monitoring of reports of such symptoms could both protect the health of children from bioterrorist attacks and from toxins in the environment. It could also improve their health on a daily basis by helping school nurses identify children with poorly managed chronic illnesses, and recognize and manage the routine outbreaks of infectious diseases that occur each year. The study plan focuses on creation of a computer telephone interviewing system and a formative evaluation that will include both qualitative and quantitative components and will assess the feasibility, validity, and potential usefulness of the system.

描述（由申请人提供）： 在任何给定的工作日中，多数以上的美国人口在学校。虽然我们都希望学校成为当今学习学校的安全场所，面临严重的健康威胁，包括生物恐怖主义。在适当的项目中，我们将开发和评估一种称为亚洲的系统（引起旷工症状级评估网络），旨在监测学校儿童的健康。我们的系统专注于监视儿童的学校出勤，因为大多数专家都认为，隔离学的缺勤是社区爆发的早期迹象。但是，学校缺勤并不是爆发或流行病的精确迹象。旷工通常甚至与疾病无关，而是反映了儿童家庭环境中的问题，重要的社会或文化义务，甚至是家庭娱乐的机会。但是，如果一个系统可以鉴定出由于疾病而缺勤并收集导致疾病相关的症状的数据，该怎么办？这样的系统很可能会在人群中提供早期，高度特定的疾病信号，从而使公共和学校卫生官员在他们的课程中很早就发现学校的疫情。我们建议开发一个语音XML语音处理系统，该系统可以在简短的电话访谈中准确捕获，因此一个人正在造成缺席的症状。我们建议修改“工作过程”学区用来让父母或监护人报告说他们的孩子将不在学校。父母将使用交互式语音回应问卷（或网站，如果愿意的话）来报告（自愿）导致孩子缺席的症状。我们认为，监测此类症状的报告既可以保护儿童的健康免受生物恐怖袭击，又可以保护环境中的毒素。它还可以通过帮助学校护士识别患有管理不善的慢性疾病的儿童，并识别和管理每年发生的常规传染病爆发，从而改善他们的健康。研究计划着重于创建计算机电话访谈系统和形成性评估，该评估将包括定性和定量组件，并将评估系统的可行性，有效性和潜在实用性。