An Interview With Will Dixon
Organizer Of The New Digital Epidemiology Summer Program In Manchester
UK
EM:
Where did the idea come from to have this program?
Dixon:
Over the course of the last few years, the Arthritis Research UK
Centre for Epidemiology in Manchester has been accumulating experience
in running successful digital epidemiology projects. We have, for
example, run Cloudy with a Chance of Pain, a national
smartphone study in the UK examining the relationship between weather
and pain in people with arthritis and other long-term conditions.
We successfully recruited over 13,000 participants, with one in seven
entering daily data for six months or more. The analysis has also
involved lots of novel challenges given the continuous nature of the
weather exposure and daily symptom reports.
In this
and other projects, there has been lots of learning that we thought
would be useful to share - so we set up the Summer School. Whilst we
draw on expertise within our own department, we have also invited an
excellent and diverse faculty to give us wide coverage of how new
digital opportunities will change epidemiology, noting both the
opportunities and challenges.
EM:
Is this the first program of its kind that you know
about?
Dixon:
Yes, this is the first Digital Epidemiology course that we’re aware
of.
EM:
What are the key topics you will cover?
Dixon:
Throughout the three days, participants will learn all about how to
capture and use digital health data to support high-quality
epidemiological research. The programme covers opportunities,
challenges and methods across a variety of data types, with day 1
dedicated to electronic health records and linked data; Day 2 to
patient-generated data, for example as collected through smartphones;
and Day 3 to data from wearable sensors, internet of things and social
media.
EM:
Who would find this program of special interest?
Dixon:
In line with the multidisciplinarity of the field, we developed the
program with a broad audience in mind, including: clinical
epidemiologists and population health researchers; health data
scientists and informaticians; but we also expect that clinicians or
people from industry with an interest in epidemiology or data science
will get plenty from this course.
EM:
What other things would you like to say about your
program, or the people in it, or what you hope comes from the program?
Dixon:
The program will be delivered by an internationally renowned and
multidisciplinary faculty. The programme is led by John McBeth
and Sabine van der Veer and myself. Our guest Faculty includes
epidemiologists such as Liam Smeeth, Malcolm Maclure and
Soren Brage, biostatisticians including Antonio Gasparrini,
health informaticians like David Ford and John Ainsworth
and computer scientists including Goran Nenadic. We also have
industry faculty members from Google and Google DeepMind.
The
faculty will deliver interactive seminars on cutting-edge methods for
collecting and analysing digital data in the context of
epidemiological studies, and use real-life examples to demonstrate
these methods in action. The course will remain strongly anchored in
how digital methods relate to the fundamentals of epidemiology. ■
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