Background A surveillance system is the foundation for disease prevention and control. Malaria surveillance is crucial for tracking regional and temporal patterns in disease incidence, assisting in recorded details, timely reporting, and frequency of analysis. Objective In this study, we aim to develop an integrated surveillance graphical app called FeverTracker, which has been designed to assist the community and health care workers in digital surveillance and thereby contribute toward malaria control and elimination. Methods FeverTracker uses a geographic information system and is linked to a web app with automated data digitization, SMS text messaging, and advisory instructions, thereby allowing immediate notification of individual cases to district and state health authorities in real time. Results The use of FeverTracker for malaria surveillance is evident, given the archaic paper-based surveillance tools used currently. The use of the app in 19 tribal villages of the Dhalai district in Tripura, India, assisted in the surveillance of 1880 suspected malaria patients and confirmed malaria infection in 93.4% (114/122; Plasmodium falciparum), 4.9% (6/122; P vivax), and 1.6% (2/122; P falciparum/P vivax mixed infection) of cases. Digital tools such as FeverTracker will be critical in integrating disease surveillance, and they offer instant data digitization for downstream processing. Conclusions The use of this technology in health care and research will strengthen the ongoing efforts to eliminate malaria. Moreover, FeverTracker provides a modifiable template for deployment in other disease systems.

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There has been increasing popularity in large scale mapping for deriving 3D surface and elevation models of earth and building structures. The techniques of computer vision comprising feature detections and matching and photogrammetry play an important role in deriving near accurate 3D reconstruction of scenes from 2D images. Since the images captured by the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) are of high resolution, there is need for more sophisticated processing and analysis of the imagery to generate 3D models and other useful imagery products. The open source softwares are excellent tools for research and can be modified or changed to suit our model, as specific or combinations of algorithms behave differently based on the nature of UAV image scene to be processed. Though many algorithms are available for performing feature extractions from images, few studies have been carried out to identify suitable detector algorithms to be used based on the nature of image or scene that the UAV captures. An attempt has been made to understand and analyse the suitability of feature detection and descriptor algorithms for different scene types. This article also describes the popular technique called structure from motion process pipeline for sequential processing of UAV images with high overlapping, which involves the estimation of 3D point clouds from the keypoint correspondences. The relative accuracy of the 3D point cloud derived from our approach is comparable with similar output from other state-of-the-art UAV processing systems and is found to match with high precision.

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