Technology for preventing the pandemic

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The Microsoft Disaster Response is an internal group that assists governments and organizations on global emergencies. The Mexican subsidiary and community volunteers are now working on developing emergency support systems for the Influenza A(H1N1) and H1N1, including:

  • RSS, e-Mail, SMS delivery to the three screens. Notifications on the PC, phone and TV coming from news Web sites, Blogs, twitter, social networks and internal systems.
    • Automated report agents can provide conversational style interactions over IM and answer question on preparedness, location of healt centers and general QA.
    • Official sites might offer live translation widget that runs on multiple web platforms so that non-Spanish speakers can closely monitor new information
    • The XBOX 360 can be leveraged to deliver alerts and health education material.
    • Centralized notifications. Microsoft Vine is a new personal command center that receives notification from different services to be connected with the persons and places that are important to us.
  • Remote work. As travel reduction is required and employees need to work from home, we expect increased use use on virtually collocated meeting tools like SharedView and Live Meeting. A lot of companies are still not keeping document repositories on the cloud. Software + Services is critical: offline is required on several locations.
  • Social Media. Can misinform but is great to coordinate social activity. The “Profesionales Mexicanos en el extranjero” LinkedIn group is a channel to receive ideas from abroad.
  • Visualization and research. Can be as simple as GIS mashups, moving Health organization sites to redundant data centers up to full research systems. E.g. Microsoft Amalga that enables real time exchange of information between Emergency Rooms (video).

Emerging countries are discovering the real power of the web today, this in turn will produce new creative applications and increased technology use. Open up the internal communications channels and map the people/technology/locations to ensure business availability. The reduction of the physical human contact is critical until we develop vaccines: prepare yourself.