The first case of Ebola in the United States has been identified in Dallas, TX, with one person in the hospital, four people under house quarantine, and around 100 people as “persons of interest” who had association with “Patient Zero.” Children may have been exposed, raising fears at the local schools and kids saying they are uncomfortable going back. (Then again, find me a child who wants to choose between being in the classroom and outside). It is time for WebRTC to step-up and play a role in this outbreak in the U.S. and ultimately in Africa.
Ebola is an ugly disease, so it’s no surprise that people are reacting with an abundance of caution. However, suspected exposure doesn’t mean guaranteed exposure. There are numbers of people who may have to sit at home for 21 days, taking and logging temperatures twice a day while reporting results to local authorities.
Telemedicine is a “savior app” here, especially given access to broadband in urban areas and WebRTC’s speed in creating new applications is vital, especially given the fluidness of the situation. Nobody’s managed an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. , so developing an app or series of apps for public health is bound to be a dynamic process as officials figure out what information they do need and how to effectively collect it.
Public health officials can conduct daily “virtual house calls” to quarantined patients, discussing concerns, making sure people are staying home, conducting interviews and looking at people without being in the same room.
In an ideal world, we’d have a low-cost wireless thermometer logged to each individual in the household automatically reporting temperatures to whatever public health monitoring system is cooked up, with a process sounding an alert if a measurement time is overdue. I don’t think Samsung or third-parties have the hardware available, but it’d sure be nice to have right now to “live test.”
Regardless, people are fearful. Education is the key to make people aware of what they should and shouldn’t be concerned about. A virtual public health desk can provide the public face-to-face contact with officials and caseworks, doing so at a far more rapid pace than having to drive from place to place while providing a physical “firewall” to stop potential exposure.
Image via Shutterstock.
Speaking of education, let’s talk about concerned parents who might pull their children from school or a worst-case scenario where schools are closed to stop exposure. If you are going to keep people isolated in the house, you might as well keep the classes going virtually rather than having to work out make-up days when the crisis lifts. Teachers may not enjoy running virtual classes, but if officials have to close a school system for 21 to 28 days, there may be few alternatives.
Rapidly creating remote learning on a mass scale will be a considerable challenge. WebRTC is likely to be duct tape for an initial solution, since school systems that aren’t already plugged into education support systems like Blackboard, and will not be able to shell out big bucks overnight for licenses. Going back to WebRTC’s strengths: It’s fast, it includes voice and video, it’s open source, and it runs on a bunch of platforms at very low cost. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some very interesting web sites emerge from “stress demand” remote learning needs.
The biggest challenge is being able to take these quick and dirty solutions and duplicate them from the bandwidth rich ‘burbs' of Dallas and deploy them in green field areas of Africa. Infrastructure, language, and cost will all play into the potential of telemedicine and distance education to stop Ebola, but modern civilization is at the point where it cannot afford not to apply the latest technologies to fighting the outbreak of this disease.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
