A Smart Card-Based Electronic School Absenteeism System for Influenza-Like Illness Surveillance in Hong Kong: Design, Implementation, and Feasibility Assessment.

We designed and implemented a novel smart card technology-based school absenteeism surveillance system. Our study demonstrated the feasibility of building a large-scale surveillance system riding on a routinely adopted data collection approach and the use of simple system enhancement to minimize workload implication and enhance system acceptability. Data from this system have potential value in supplementing existing sentinel influenza surveillance for situational awareness of influenza activity in the community.