Enabling digital health by automatic classification of short messages

Muhammad Imran, Patrick Meier, Carlos Castillo, Andre Lesa, Manuel Garcia Herranz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In response to the growing HIV/AIDS and other health-related issues, UNICEF through their U-Report platform receives thousands of messages (SMS) every day to pro-vide prevention strategies, health case advice, and counsel-ing support to vulnerable population. Due to a rapid in-crease in U-Report usage (up to 300% in last 3 years), plus approximately 1,000 new registrations each day, the volume of messages has thus continued to increase, which made it impossible for the team at UNICEF to process them in a timely manner. In this paper, we present a platform de-signed to perform automatic classification of short messages (SMS) in real-Time to help UNICEF categorize and prior-itize health-related messages as they arrive. We employ a hybrid approach, which combines human and machine intel-ligence that seeks to resolve the information overload issue by introducing processing of large-scale data at high-speed while maintaining a high classification accuracy. The sys-Tem has recently been tested in conjunction with UNICEF in Zambia to classify short messages received via the U-Report platform on various health related issues. The system is designed to enable UNICEF make sense of a large volume of short messages in a timely manner. In terms of evalua-Tion, we report design choices, challenges, and performance of the system observed during the deployment to validate its effectiveness.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDH 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 Digital Health Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages61-65
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450342247
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Apr 2016
Event6th International Conference on Digital Health, DH 2016 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 11 Apr 201613 Apr 2016

Publication series

NameDH 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 Digital Health Conference

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Digital Health, DH 2016
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period11/04/1613/04/16

Keywords

  • Hybrid system
  • Short text classification
  • Stream processing
  • Supervised machine learning

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