Placing Australia at the forefront of digital public health

EPIWATCH® is an AI-driven open-source outbreak observatory, its system harnessing vast, open-source data to generate automated early warnings for epidemics worldwide. Created by Professor Raina MacIntyre, the Head of Biosecurity Program at UNSW’s Kirby Institute, the award-winning tool works by scanning millions of items of publicly available online data, including social media ‘chatter’ and local news reports, for early signals of epidemics.  

Using over 46 global languages including the major languages of Asia, EPIWATCH® peruses vast amounts of data on a daily basis, with the aim of detecting any changes to what is considered 'normal' reports about health concerns. EPIWATCH® has been proven to identify disease outbreak signals earlier than traditional laboratory or hospital-based surveillance.

As well as drawing upon the capacities of artificial intelligence, the success of EPIWATCH® is derived from the knowledge and capacity of its human expertise - with a large team of experts in field epidemiology, epidemic response, natural language processing and geographic information system capability, who meet weekly to review the outbreak alerts, analyse early signals of epidemics, and identify important or high threat outbreaks. Their collective expertise means they can readily read the data being collated and collected by AI, and form context and responses faster. 

Amongst the experts is UNSW Civil & Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Samsung Lim, from our SAGE group, who has been collaborating with Professor MacIntyre since 2016 on a number of GIS-based epidemiology studies, including the mitigation of emerging biological and chemical threats, geospatial analysis of emerging avian influenza viruses, anthrax dispersion modelling, and a randomised controlled clinical trial of mask use in control of respiratory outcomes during bushfire season. 

Their collaboration and research prior to Covid-19 was timely and Lim and MacIntyre were able to contribute actively to the understanding and containment of COVID-19.  EPIWATCH® has been used by the Department of Health (who trialled in their National Incident Room), and a range of health stakeholders in Australia. In 2024 EPIWATCH® was showcased in a wargame by US IndoPacific Command, and Lim accompanied the EPIWATCH® team to Honolulu for this event.

EPIWATCH® development began in 2016 and is continually underpinned by extensive research and testing. It has received grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), and in 2022-2023 over USD $8M funding from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Lim’s main research interest has always been to apply GIS to real-world problems and help decision-making in the fields of natural disaster/emergency management and public health research. He has overseen the technical development of EPIWATCHÒ in 2022-23 when he was seconded to The Kirby Institute, and contributed to geospatial analysis on the sources and distribution of infectious diseases, assessment of the effects of environmental conditions on the diseases, and identification of threats to human health. He supervises several PhD students doing cross-disciplinary work across Engineering and Medicine and Health.

While medical researchers focus on events within the human body, GIS expertise can correlate disease occurrence with surrounding factors – physical factors such as population, temperature, precipitation, mobility, elevation, seasonal variations etc. Knowledge of these physical and geographical factors improves disease outbreak predictions - the probabilities of spread and reoccurrence.

Lim believes the uses and need for EPIWATCH® as an early warning system for disease outbreaks can only increase.  Climate change has enabled the spread of disease, increasing the frequency and severity of epidemics (including cholera). Here in Australia mosquitoes usually ‘confined’ to tropical FNQ and NT carrying the Japanese encephalitis virus arrived in southern parts of Australia in the Murray Valley on border of NSW and Victoria first in May 2022, as a result of the 2020-2023 triple-dip La Niña which brought record-breaking rainfall and flooding across Eastern Australia. 

Climate change also impacts other species patterns and pathways – for example the migration of birds as they seek to avoid extreme weather events - and brings species into connection with one another in new places where previously their paths did not overlap. Avian influenza once primarily located in SE Asia (mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam) is now spreading – present now in the USA, EU, UK and Brazil. More bird-mammal contact has increased, as has the risk, says Lim, of inter-species transference of disease.

Lim has played a pivotal role in developing advanced geospatial techniques for EPIWATCH®. His research on novel GIS methods resulted in EPIWATCH® being capable of auto-identifying red flags on epidemics.

The automatic red flagging developed in this research enables governments and health authorities to respond rapidly with public policy in real time and for health care professionals and clinicians to implement them. ‘This places Australia’ says Lim, ‘at the forefront of digital public health and drives transformative global change.’