Fighting bites with bytes: Promoting public health with crowdsourced tick prevention

Description

Ticks are on the rise and transmit several infectious diseases, leading to serious illness or even death. The smartphone App “Zecke–Tick Prevention helps people, to remember the tick bite location and to check it for potential Lyme disease symptoms. In an interdisciplinary approach, ZHAW-scientists want to find out more about spatial tick risks. Working with anonymous transmitted data of unknown quality, is the biggest challenge for this study:We want to create a new prevention tool to support tick prevention in public health with a spatial-temporal model about the current tick risk.The dynamic visualization of the special tick risk will help people to prevent tick borne diseases more efficient in everyday life.We want to develop a method to handle the notoriously uncertain crowdsourced Citizen Science data.The newly developed model and methods may be applied on other risk modellings based on crowdsourced data.