Indian Public Health Intelligence Network (IPHIN) is an open source software designed to predict disease outbreaks in India. Commonly any unusual cluster of disease incidence in an area is reported by local news papers, which is later on picked up by state or national media. News papers are published in local languages, each state having their own. The content of such news gives insights into upcoming outbreaks, whose value in preventing life threatening epidemics is outstanding.
IPHIN software scans Indian local as well as state news papers for reporting any such events. Scanning of online news (known as web scraping) is sometimes prevented by news sites and different data mining techniques are used as work around. IPHIN scans online news papers for 57 medical terms in 10 different Indian languages. If a report has several clinical features, it gathers such data and employs a…
