R Shiny applications for modelling vector surveillance and control

Project details

Year: 2021-2022

Client: Epiconcept for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Objective: Improvement of two R Shiny modelling applications to support the decision-making process for surveillance and vector control of dengue, chikungunya, Zika and West Nile Virus diseases.

Deliverables:

• Improved AedesRisk tool’s security, outputs, and errors and log management.
• VeCa MATLAB tool translated into an R Shiny application with improved security, outputs, and errors and log management.
• Updated user guides.

Performed activities

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control had developed two modelling tools to support the decision-making process for surveillance and vector control:

• The AedesRisk R-Shiny tool for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika virus disease.
• The Vector Control Analysis (VeCa) MATLAB tool for West Nile virus infection.

We added the following functionalities to the existing AedesRisk R-Shiny application (Figure 1):

• Blocked access to bots.
• Automated check of uploaded files and improved error and log management.
• Improved memory management of the computation model.
• Estimates of prediction intervals added to the simulations results.

We translated the existing VeCa MATLAB into an R-Shiny application and added the functionalities developed to the AedesRisk application.

We updated the user guides of both tools adding a case study scenario to the VeCa application (Figure 2).