Dear Enrique,

this is a very interesting question and interesting work!

In my research group, I deal with disaster risks analysis, risks mitigation, emergency management and simulation (see e.g.: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2212420914000648 ), and I have noticed many important system for early warning based on sensors or devices:

-earthquake http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-21887-3_30 ; http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0267726110001855 ;

-structures response: http://shm.sagepub.com/content/10/3/291.abstract ; flood: http://dare.uva.nl/document/478296 ; http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/17/1161/2013/ ;

-landslides: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=3758594&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract .

An overwiev can be offered here:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ind/ijcis/2009/00000006/00000001/art00003

The importance of EWS is now confirmed in different conditions:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0925753510001360 http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0925753512000641

and also included in simulation tools in order to define the effectiveness of the system (e.g.: http://www.gsdi.org/gsdiconf/gsdi12/papers/132.pdf  ) or EWS database (e.g.: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829214001312 ).

EWS can be adopted also for other situations:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479714002059

About the participation of citizens to EWS, I could suggest the use of data from social netwroks:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2012.07.011 ; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740624X13000828

, in application also to the smart cities context:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/lpdocs/epic03/wrapper.htm?arnumber=5976190

IN our research group we are also developing devices and models that could include EWS in emergency conditions in order to assist people during the emergency and the evacuation; a prior result will be published soon on an international journal.

I hope that my answer could provide you a larger number of details for your researchs. Thanks for your attention, I'am at your disposals,

Gabriele

Wow, quite information. Thanks Gabriele. We want to check it depth. I will give you our view then. Thank you so much!

You might like to consider Paul Gilding's book 'The Great Disruption' and his recent post suggesting that it may happen this year!

I will check it, Toby. Thank you!

Enrique

you might be interested in a few reports that are available for download at the National Academies Press Namely:

Geotargeted Alerts and Warnings: Report of a Workshop on Current Knowledge and Research Gaps.

This PDF is available from The National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18414

Public Response to Alerts and Warnings Using Social Media: Report of a Workshop on Current Knowledge and Research Gaps.

This PDF is available from The National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=15853.

There are a lot of open systems and visualizations available which can help a person maintain their situational awareness in relation to a number of events for example:

Global disasters and emerging situations see http://www.pdc.org/

Global Weather See http://earth.nullschool.net/ 

There are also a lot of apps available for providing alerts and the Association of Public Safety Officials is playing a leadership role in supporting the development of a diverse, practitioner-driven public safety app ecosystem fostered through the collaborative efforts of public safety professionals and app developers. In April 2013, APCO launched the Application Community at www.AppComm.org. AppComm serves as the single, trusted resource for applications related to public safety and emergency response.

I think it is useful to break this subject down into two broad components, namely a system that supports the early detection or indication of a particular event and secondly a system that is used to provide the community early warning of an event.   You can break this down further if you like but these two categories focus on the decision makers within the official public safety organisations and secondly on the community.   In relation to community warning systems there has been a lot of research conducted here in Australia in relation to how the community understands and reacts to warnings.

Bio-Surveillance  is very important on a day-to-day basis, but becomes critical after a disaster when you have an increase risk of disease as we saw in Haiti, so you might be interested in looking at the rapid deployment of sensor networks post disaster to provide early warning of diseases.

Here at the University of Melbourne at the Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety (see http://www.cdmps.org.au/)  we are very interested in this topic.   Please let me know if you are interested in any further collaboration.

Regards

Ged

Thank you Ged. We are currently analysing your web-links and tomorrow we will discuss them. Something like this is what we are looking for. If you are interested in our work, you can go cheking periodically our blog: http://pobics.blogspot.com.es/

Thanks Enrique  I will check  the blog.   Please don't hesitate to let me know if you need any more information or if you would like to develop a joint project.

Hi again, Ged. As I said to you, yesterday we had our weekly meeting and I told about you. We found so interesting all the things you facilitated us, and now we would rather know if you have or know any webpage or document about the "history" of Early Warning Systems along the past decades.

On the other hand, we also want to inquire about the origin of the "biosurveillance" concept, that is, when and why surveillance became BIO surveillance?

Thank you one more time Ged, we will keep in touch.

Hi Enrique,

I am glad that you found the references of interest. It is a good question. I cannot recall any book or paper on the history of biosurveillance although health monitoring (human, plant & animal) is not my area of expertise.

In Australia we have used biosurvellance as part of our boarder protection mechanisms for many many years as part of a sentinel surveillance system. For example at international airports we have a number of collection points for mosquitoes. In terms of human health I think the WHO might be the best place to commence a search on the use of sentinel surveillance systems for human diseases. In our agricultural industries we have a number of biosurvellance systems for invasive weeds and pests.

Several years ago I was involved in some discussions about monitoring the sale of certain prescription and non-prescription medication from chemists however due to the complexity and cost of potential solutions I don’t think this progressed too far.

We regular monitor our morbidity rates and this is very helpful in understanding the impact of things like heatwaves; however, that misses the point as far as a proactive biosurvellance system.

If you like I will try to reach out to a few of my colleagues.

I know you are interested in human health biosurveillance, but are you also interested in plant or animal biosurveillance to compare different approaches?

Regards

Ged