Use Mobile Data & Predictive Analytics To Prevent Spread of #Corona Virus

For most of us, our cell phones are our lifelines. Our cell phone witness and capture a lot of information about what we do, see, and share in our daily lives. We may not note or recall where all we have traveled and which route we took through the but a cell phone data can give accurate log of your activities to the second. , Cell phones are recording your activities every second and sending it to telephone company, app company and Google. As I have mentioned earlier as well, a small set of data by itself seldom has any value but by data analysis and correlation with other data sets we can tell a lot about people. There are these products called Predictive Analytics tools that can this data to predict your next move. Today every person carries a mobile phone and we use CDR (maintained by mobile company) & tower data (collected by mobile company for ech tower) to find how many people were around a particular cell phone user at any given time. (Read my older blog on How Google collects cell phone data including your voice data to know what we are dealing with today, but that's not related to today's post)

Let's assume a person 'A' has been infected with #Corona Virus  and another person 'B' was in close proximity of person A. Predictive analysis can scan through huge bulk of location data and highlight the phone numbers that were present in the locality at the given time. We can also trace their activity for a duration of time and create a profile of the person and predict

1) What is his residential area of the #Carona infected person

2) What are the addresses he frequented in last X days

3) What are the number of his close associates and by correlation who are their close associates?

4) What is a persons daily routine?

5) Does he own a personal vehicle or does he use public transport  (public transport has regular stops & fixed route)

6) By further correlation with data from financial institutions we can predict the persons credit-card or banking details

7) We can tell about his family members or the people who stay with the infected #Carona patient

8) We can identify the people who came within 1 meter of distance and could possibly be infected

Plan of Action for Govetrment of India

In the figure below if we analyze the CDR (Call Data Record of all mobile towers frequented by the #CoronaVirus patient and crete a virtual Geo fence of 1 meter radius around him, we can find how many people went close than 1 meter and so can possibly be infected by yhe  #CaronaVirus patient. All people who were in close prozimity of a infected  #CaronaVirus patient should be quantined as per the current goverment rule and kept under observation for 14 days. Mobile CDR can be analyzed using a Predictive Analytics software that can not onoly predict potential people who can get the virus but also show various trends of the #CoronaVirus. 

Suggested Plan:

1. Make a list of all confirmed #CaronaVirus positive cases
2. Get CDR data of patient from mobile companies ( Need Magistrate permission or blanket approval from PMO)
3. Get details of all mobile phone within 1 meter radius of #Carona Patient as ‘Potential Cases’
4. Ask local authority to contact all ‘Potential Cases’ and inquire about symptoms
5. Local authority & doctors should put all ‘Potential Cases’ on 24/7 monitoring for 14 days and check daily status 
6. Data engineer can write a software to analyze the CDR data and identify phone number of ‘Potential Cases’ who were in close contact of confirmed #CaronaVirus patient
7. Call Data Record  along with Tower Data record can be used to predict gorwth of #Corona cases and also help us in identifying ways to stop further infections 
8. Preditive Analysic has huge potential and can provide surprising predictions and there should be no delay in implementing Data Analytics
9. Government should take help of voulenteers from provate software companies to work on this initiative 

At the minimum a central  Data Analytics team of goverment of #India should be collecting data from all cities that have reported Carona Virus cases. The Data should be sent to the central team ASAP the city team gets some new data about the patient. This data set is cleansed and fed to the Predictive Analysis software to create a model and then predict various scenarios based on historical data ( in this case historical data can be just 3 weeks old) . The Call Data Record data can be collected from mobile serice providers like Vodafone, BSNL, Airtel & Jio on request from goverment.  private individual cannot get this data for security reasons.