The goal of the STAMINA platform is to allow the seamless integration of epidemiological information from various data sources and tools into a modular platform. STAMINA will provide services to organisations differing widely in organisational structure and access rights to various data sets and tools. The geographic location of these health authorities, differentiations in endemic pathogens and other regional parameters, such as climate and weather conditions, adds to this heterogeneity. As several tools are already deployed in these institutions, STAMINA’s aim is to maximise the use of similar tools across countries and organizations and provide additional resources.
The STAMINA toolset aims for flexibility and the ability to deploy subsets of its modules based on regional needs. Another factor that drives the decision for modularity is the future exploitation of the STAMINA platform. While the project will offer a complete platform, it is more realistic to expect that its deployment as a flexible set of modular and tailored to the current needs of a health care institution services will be easier to exploit than offering a rigid platform. This differs the envisioned toolset from a simple application with a predefined business logic that narrows its ultimate breadth and scope[1]. The philosophy behind this decision aims, as already mentioned, to facilitate the exploitation of the developed modules and make use of STAMINA tools as widespread as possible. Moreover, the platform is built with flexibility inherently present in its design, allowing fast and cost-effective development and deployment of new types of modules, while also providing an approach to designing and implementing flexible architectures needed to support these adaptive applications.
The STAMINA toolset can be conceptualized as follows. STAMINA provides a holistic situational awareness and decision support system that collects data through Point-of-Care technologies (POCTs), combines it with existing datasets, processes, analyses, and issues warnings through a scalable Early Warning System. Through sophisticated predictive models, possible scenarios in the development of an epidemic/pandemic event are generated. These scenarios are visualized though adaptive visualizations i.e., map-based visualization targeted to different types of stakeholders such as health experts, decision makers, front line workers and civil society.
A general view of our starting point, as depicted below, illustrates the presence of multiple tools and data sources that will be put in the service of health care institutions.
STAMINA envisions a set of tools and services that will comprise its platform. These tools will be used by various experts from the projects end users. STAMINA envisions three main categories of users for its tools: national planners, first responders, and international authorities. Each category of user has their own needs for STAMINA’s tools, which are identified as:
- National planners
- Sense of the attitudes and beliefs of the public and health workers
- Decision-making support (incl. visualization of data)
- Enhanced interoperability
- Simulation and forecast of pandemic development
- First responders (national and regional)
- Clarity and timeliness in information on health resources (where from whom etc.)
- Diagnostic capacity
- Training needs
- Danger of pandemic spread (for example, infecting vulnerable groups through patient transportation)
- International Authorities
- Communication and cooperation with leaders and organisations in neighbouring countries
- Information on pandemic management in neighbouring countries
- Transboundary approach to crisis management
- Integration in pandemic management technologies with neighbouring countries
Data integration
A cross-country implementation is proposed by the project. In such a deployment the platform will need to digest data from various sources and national domains, while following the data privacy and security regulations of each supporting country.
A number of interactions between the modules and the data sources is envisioned. In order to facilitate the deployment of all the modules, and to make interconnections easier, STAMINA will utilise:
- the Integration of Point-of-Care module, the Data Management and Harmonisation module for managing inputs of medical information from the project’s historical datasets,
- the POC diagnostic and SmartKo devices that generate data from bio-sampling processing and pathogen/virus genetic material detection as well as biosignals captured via the wearable devices,
- the WMSA tool that needs to mine information from social media and other web data sources will include an embedded data acquisition module that will be responsible for the data mining from the identified web sources.
All internal communications between the various STAMINA tools will be realised with the use of the STAMINA Message Broker, as depicted above. This allows for partners to easily post their outputs and digest available information using a single point of communication, thus making the internal communication less complicated. A detailed description of these modules can be found in their respective chapters. The image below shows an overview of the planned interconnections.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2015/03/17/whats-the-difference-between-a-software-product-and-a-platform/?sh=72bed25e56a6