Validity of contact diaries compared with electronic sensors for measuring household contacts in Mozambique Público
Shiiba, Machi (Spring 2024)
Abstract
Measuring social contacts and their characteristics is an important aspect of infectious disease modeling. Traditionally, a self-kept contact diary was the popular method as it can capture the characteristics of contacts such as age, sex, location of contacts, and the existence of physical contacts. Recently, wearable proximity sensors got more attention in measuring contacts because it does not depend on participants’ memory, and they are objective overall. However, there are a limited number of studies that compared the two measurements, especially in low-resource household settings. Therefore, this study aimed to compare and validate the household contacts measured by diaries and sensors in Mozambican households. We compared the number of contacts, age characteristics of contacts, and infant proximity scores by age groups between contact diary and wearable proximity sensor. While cleaning the dataset to suit the analysis, we encountered many losses for the sensor dataset due to loss of sensor and inconsistent data. We also had an issue with identifying the contacted person in the diary dataset which excluded many recorded contacts from our analysis. The overall number of contacts recorded by diary and sensors was similar while the age-specific average number of contacts indicated a higher number of reported contacts in diary measurement. The diary could not capture the difference in the duration of contacts with infants while sensors detected longer duration of contacts of infants with parents’ age groups. We concluded that two measurements had specific characteristics they could capture which we need to consider for conducting future studies to measure social contacts. With the data loss in sensor and unidentifiable people in the diary dataset, we aim to conduct further analysis for future study.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Material and Methods
2.1. Study population
2.2. Data collection
2.2.1. Contact diary
2.2.2. Wearable sensors
2.3. Statistical Analysis
2.4. Ethical considerations
3. Results
3.1.Participants’ characteristics
3.2. Number of contacts
3.3. Contact matrices representing average number of contacts
3.4. Infant proximity score (IPS)
4. Discussion
4.1. Key findings
4.2. Limitations
4.3. Strengths
4.4. Comparison with literature
4.5. Public health implications
5. Supplementary materials
6. References
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