GeoAI-based epidemic control with geo-social data sharing on blockchain

ABSTRACT

Epidemics especially those caused by major contagious diseases have entailed huge losses in human history. The fights have thus never stopped to prevent pandemics. Due to its acute outbreak, is generally susceptible to the population regardless of ages, so strict quarantine of the infections becomes the most effective means for the epidemic control, which has been proved in the prevention of other contagious diseases such as SARS and H1N1. The key strategy widely used to find infected and suspected patients is still the epidemiological tracking of confirmed cases. However, this may fail to identify infections especially when patients do not show any symptoms. Therefore, the approach to rapid, effective, and simple infection identification is essential to prevent the spread of a contagious disease. This paper proposes to leverage a social apps and Geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) with Blockchain to effectively identify infections with privacy concern. Since people widely use social apps, a large scale of social data with geospatial information could be easily collected and kept on Blockchain with privacy preservation, which thus provides a framework of decentralized, tamper-proof, and privacy-preserved information sharing. With the support of GeoAI, which analyzes the spatial distribution of diseases from the shared data, we could study the influence factors based on spatial propagation of contagious diseases for infection identification. Since WeChat is widely used in China, we take COVID-19 as an example to use the experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and provide insight into epidemic control in terms of geo-social data sharing. © 2021 IEEE.