Anatomy of a sneeze gesture

As the World Health Organization raise the pandemic alert level, the highest it has been in many years, we are inundated with media coverage of the swine flu and its affects. It is difficult not to think about what we could do in our research capacity in computer vision to aid in the efforts to deter the outbreaks of infectious diseases. From the imaging perspective, we know that thermal imaging have been used to provide instant notification of high temperature of passengers in busy transit areas such as airports. These systems were put to use after the SARS (bird flu) outbreak earlier this decade, and are now being proliferated for the swine flu.

Perhaps one possible idea is to add capability to video analytics to track those suspected as carriers of the virus. It might be interesting just to consider detecting gestures like a sneeze. It might not be as simple as you think. There might be a sudden head tilt, compression of chest and throat, and eyes shutting. There might even be hand gestures covering the facial area. If you pay attention to people in the flu season, you would notice that some would sneeze on their hands, some on their sleeves, and some would not even cover their sneeze. There is simply not enough data on the anatomy of a sneeze to understand the basic makeup of it in terms of a gesture.

We can also consider another means to confirm the sneeze. Gesture analysis can be made more robust with corresponding audio of a sneeze. Again, it might not be as simple as you think. Sneezing is a reflexive act, so the vocal output is not controlled. Each sneeze sounds different from another, even from the same person. It is also interesting to note that those around the sneeze might respond with a bless you or geshundheit, but again, this is not guaranteed.

These ideas have some technical merits. One might argue that once you can detect the high temperature and sneezing, it might already too late to stop the spread of the virus in the area. However, from a research perspective, it is still interesting. If you can find funding for such things, I would really like to hear from you.

Update On 11 June 2009, the Director-General of WHO raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 5 to phase 6 (the agency’s highest alert level, which means a pandemic, or global epidemic, is under way.)

(This article is not meant to make light of the level of seriousness around influenza pandemics such as swine flu. They must be taken seriously because they can spread rapidly around the world.)