About the Project

Many infectious diseases spread via droplets during close proximity interactions between infected and healthy individuals. For example, every year about 5% to 20% of people in the United States get sick with the flu. Understanding how individuals interact with each other is key to studying the spread of such diseases.

In January 2010, we set out to collect data on all close proximity interactions in a closed network - a U.S. high school. We recruited over 700 people - students, teachers, and staff - and asked them to wear wireless TelosB motes around their necks for a day. Every 20 seconds, the motes broadcast 'Hello' messages, with nearby nodes recording what they heard. At the end of the school day, we collected enough data to reconstruct the real-life social network of the entire school.

The publications below give details on both the technical and epidemiology aspects of our work. You can also explore the code used to collect the data, as well as the dataset itself. Feel free to contact Maria (technical q's) and Marcel (epidemilogy q's). Welcome, and enjoy!

Publications

Data

Code

In the Media

People