May 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

Bird in the hand

Tool streamlines acquisition of avian flu field-data

Torsten Staab downloads information from his avian surveillance tool onto a laptop computer. The tool also enables the user to track physical samples and to capture epidemiological data in the form of videos, photos, text, and voice recordings. These devices will track bird flu outbreaks across the globe this spring.

While Laboratory researcher Torsten Staab's inventions help fulfill his aspiration of making a positive impact on society, many of them also can be described as "way cool." Among these is his new hand-held avian surveillance tool, a first-of-its-kind device that dons the colors of UCLA, its sponsor.

The Chemical Diagnostics and Engineering team leader's latest technology takes field-data-acquisition practices beyond pencil and paper to digital heights, putting field surveillance for avian flu at the touch of a screen. Researchers working in the field now can electronically enter data, such as a bird's weight, sex, and species. They also can track geographic locations, take pictures of the animal, sample barcodes, and record voice notes.

The device is a specialized version of the full-feature forensic sampling device recently requested for an episode of CSI: NY, a forensic-based police show on TV. Though smaller, it too features a touch screen with graphical user interface, digital camera, GPS, microphone, memory card slot, and wireless Bluetooth and WiFi communications. The new, smaller devices are being used to track bird flu outbreaks in places such as Alaska, California, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Mongolia, Canada, Ecuador, and parts of Africa.

"By improving field-data-acquisition practices, enabling and accelerating all-digital information sharing across organizational boundaries, I hope that this little device will help researchers and health-care officials around the world detect and track outbreaks and migration patterns of potentially harmful pathogens, such as H5N1, much faster and more easily," Staab said.

Staab is unassuming and matter-of-fact about his transformational technologies, but Tony Beugelsdijk of Chemical Diagnostics and Engineering describes him as a systematic thinker who "does what he sets out to do very well, on budget, and on time."

Staab and his teammates—Craig Blackhart, lead software engineer, and David Geb, mechanical engineering student from UCLA—with manufacturing support from ESG Engineering, recently finished building 150 of the handheld, field-ruggedized, surveillance devices for the California Office of Homeland Security. The work was done through a Work for Others Agreement between UCLA's School of Public Health and the Laboratory.

In the coming months, UCLA and other collaborators at the University of California, Davis, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Wildlife Conservation Society, U.S. Geological Survey, and Canadian Wildlife Service will deploy the devices at bird-banding stations in 38 states in the United States and across Canada, Asia, and Central and South America.
"The World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health also have expressed a keen interest in our new gadget. Other potential, future application areas include wildfire fighting, environmental sampling and monitoring, and wildlife biology," Staab said.

Beyond its intended purpose, Staab confides that users can do other things with the hand-held device, including play MP3s, watch movies, play games, send e-mails, browse the Web, or simply use it as a cell phone, while waiting for the birds to land in their fly nets.
"Most bird-banding stations are staffed by students and volunteers who most likely would be very interested in the device's unadvertised entertainment features," Staab said. "To keep them focused, we have hidden these non-work-related device features."

Improvements to the device already are in the works. Staab and his team are looking at adding speaker-independent, software-based voice recognition to speed data entry even more. This, however, is technically challenging, because the device is designed to be used outside under virtually any weather condition, he explained.

In close collaboration with his colleagues from Systems Engineering and Integration, Staab's team has developed a slightly modified version of these new surveillance devices, which will be deployed in a large-scale Department of Homeland Security-sponsored BioWatch field exercise this spring.

The first in his family to go to college, Staab continues to put his doctorate in computer science to work in ways he hopes will improve people's quality of life.

One of his near-term goals is to develop—in close collaboration with Hong Cai and Jian Song, both of the Bioscience Division—an affordable, DNA-based home diagnostics test kit for presymptomatic detection of a wide variety of diseases, such as influenza, Alzheimer's, and cancer.

"This type of DNA-based test is the Holy Grail of clinical testing," said Beugelsdijk. "This is right in Torsten's domain."

-Mig Owens