Predicting the Spread of Contagious Diseases Based on Telecom's Mobility Management

In 2008, H1N1 caused huge panic in many countries of the world. Government organizations, such as Bureau of Medical Affairs at Department of Health in Taiwan, demanded answer to understand how contagious diseases like H1N1 are spread. Since mobile telecom network can efficiently monitor the movement of mobile users, the telecom’s mobility management will be an ideal mechanism for studying contagious disease’s spread. The problem can be abstracted as follows: What is the probability of a person at location A will move to location B after x hours. The answer for this problem cannot be directly obtained because the telecom network does not exactly trace the movement of all mobile users. In this talk, we show how to use the outputs (handover rates, call arrivals, and call traffic) measured in the telecom switches to derive the answer for this abstract problem.