Implementation and Management Approach

The M-Eco consortium consists of leading research groups in the areas of text mining, information extraction, personalisation, and global stability and security, two national health organizations and a provider of speech recognition technology. These are: the L3S Research Center, a joint research institute of several universities in Lower Saxony, Germany; Aalborg University in Denmark; BUT, the second largest technical university in the Czech Republic; SAIL, the Speech Artificial Intelligence Language Laboratories in Vienna, Austria; the Robert Koch Institute in Germany; the Governmental Institute of Public Health of Lower Saxony, Germany; and JRC, the Joint Research Centre, a Directorate General of the European Commission.

Additional user institutions are participating in the project through the M-Eco Advisory Board. These include representatives of the World Health Organiziation (WHO), European Center of Disease Control (ECDC), Health Protection Agency (HPA), Institut de Veille Sanitaire (INVS), and the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS).

Technology solution

Technologies related to the development of the Medicine 2.0, are rapidly changing the possibilities to assess and provide health information. These days, online media, weblogs, scientific and non-scientific discussion forums and direct electronic communication provide complements to the traditional reporting mechanisms. Importantly, the publication barrier for these types of user-generated content is much lower. In light of this, electronic media and discussion groups today are increasingly recognised as valuable sources of public health alerts. Awareness of diseases achieved through first-hand-observations and word of mouth can influence people's behaviour in a way that the risk of an outbreak and the number of infected people is reduced.