Aye Thinzar Oo

I think for me, by combining the identified by:
Sex: Female
Appearance: cute big ears
Study Major: Biomedical and Health Informatics
Study place: Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University
Status:MSc BHI student for the 2024 academic year and the only female student from Myanmar in this year.
Place of residence: Myanmar (Burma)

In my opinion, TAM suggests that if a new technology is easier to use, it is likely to be perceived as more useful than the old technology.
For example, replacing a paper-based patient record or a complex EHR with a new EHR that has simple menus, fewer data-entry steps, and auto-fill features makes it easier for health workers to complete…[Read more]

Let me share my opinion on the Health information system, external variables influencing perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness include health workers’ computer skills, system interface design and reliability, availability of training and technical support. And infrastructure factors such as internet connectivity and electricity…[Read more]

Efficacy: measures whether an intervention works under ideal conditions.
E.g. A new electronic medical record (EMR) system is tested in a pilot project with well-trained staff, good internet access and strong technical support. Under these optimal conditions, the EMR system shows significant improvement in data accuracy.

Effectiveness: how well…[Read more]

1. Improving the effectiveness of digital contact-tracing applications requires collecting only essential public health data, supported by appropriate technology, strong data protection, and clear privacy protocols.

2. Countries with limited internet access or technological capacity, digital COVID-19 tools can be adapted through some solutions…[Read more]

It can be considered another confounder, that living in urban or rural areas. Younger people are moving to live in urban centers for education and employment. Since urban environments have a higher population density, this leads to more frequent contacts through public transport, shared living spaces, and lifestyle changes. Therefore, the observed…[Read more]

Case-Fatality rate
Definition: The case-fatality rate is the proportion of persons with a particular condition (cases) who die from that condition. It is a measure of the severity of the condition.
Formula: (Number of cause-specific deaths among the incident cases / total number of incident cases) x 100
Usefulness: It is widely used to measure…[Read more]

The intervention that I am considering is vaccination. This is a powerful public health tool that, in the context of the model, will be introduced to represent the real-world vaccine rollout in Myanmar during the third wave.
In the SIRV framework, vaccination is an intervention that changes the flow of individuals between compartments.
Vaccination…[Read more]

Hello Wannisa, thank you for your excellent suggestion. Adding disease severity as a variable is a good idea. It think, It will definitely provide a clearer and more robust picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness, moving beyond just case numbers. Thanks again for your valuable input!

From the Week 1 discussion, I selected the topic: “How do varying vaccination rates affect the persistence of the COVID-19 third wave in Myanmar?” COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by the novel coronavirus known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
During the third wave in Myanmar, access to vaccines was ext…[Read more]

Thank you for your feedback Arjan Pan. I will look into the relevant literature and try to frame it more specifically for my setting

The disease I am most familiar with is COVID-19, and I would like to explore its transmission and impacts in Myanmar.

Research Question: What is the impact of varying vaccination rates and vaccine efficacy on the long-term persistence and potential elimination of COVID-19 in a population?

Hello Tanaphum, thanks for your sharing. your plan sounds like interesting and well thought out. I like how you highlight the application of coding and computational methods rather than focusing on one disease—this makes your work widely applicable. It’s also great that you are already working on a malaria model.

1. The author examined the suicide issue in Thailand due to an increasing trend and a rate exceeding 6 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Thailand’s situation is distinct from other countries because of its unique cultural, social, and economic contexts. Possible contributing factors include economic conditions (e.g., income levels, unemployment r…[Read more]

Thank you for your guidance, Wannisa, and Aung. Firstly, I updated the R version. Then, I installed ‘fmesher’ and installed INLA with this link==> install.packages(“INLA”,repos = “https://inla.r-inla-download.org/R/stable”, dep = TRUE)
Now I am okay and started playing INLA and to complete week 1 assignment.

I had still trouble installing th INLA package, see the following error message.
* installing *binary* package ‘INLA’ …
Warning in system(paste(“cp -R .”, shQuote(instdir), “|| (“, TAR, “cd – .| (cd”, :
‘cp’ not found
ERROR: installing binary package failed
* removing ‘C:/Users/Administrator/AppData/Local/R/win-library/4.4/INLA’
Warning in…[Read more]

Incorporating location into epidemiological studies has historically been difficult due to challenges in gathering and analyzing spatial data. Spatial epidemiology, an interdisciplinary field, requires expertise in epidemiology, geography, statistics, and computer science (particularly GIS) to effectively analyze disease patterns across geographic…[Read more]

Thanks for the great points! I agree that while descriptive epidemiology includes person, place, and time, earlier research mostly focused on individual factors and time trends. As you said, the lack of tools and data made it hard to study in detail. However, with advancements in technology and GIS, spatial epidemiology now plays a significantly…[Read more]