Fascinating research by James Holland Jones, PhD, an associate professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment:
Jones and his colleagues - led by Marcel Salathe, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford - used the wireless sensors to design a better method for tracking interactions in order to study how a flu outbreak might be headed off in a school. . . .
The researchers outfitted each teacher, student and staff member at an unnamed American high school with credit card-size gadgets that transmitted and received radio signals every 20 seconds during one day.
The devices logged more than 760,000 incidents when two people were within 10 feet of each other, roughly the maximum distance that a disease can be transmitted through a cough or sneeze.
Their work is detailed today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo by Hygiene Matters
