iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You

iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You

iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You


Want to know if there's been an outbreak of swine flu or equine herpes virus in the neighborhood? There's an app for that.


"What we were envisioning is things like ... say, you're in a clinical setting as a patient or clinician and seeing lots of unusual cases of something," Clark Freifeld, a founder of HealthMap and Ph.D. student in MIT Media Lab's New Media Medicine Group. "You'd be able to note that down and submit it into the system."

But, will people actually submit valuable information? The submission process is clean and simple, but the number of contributions from average users looks to be limited at least by the necessity of having the (good?) fortune to stumble upon a disease indicator and recognize it as such.

Freifeld and his HealthMap partner, John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, aren't sure how or how many people might use their app, but they'd rather build the option in and let their users decide.

"We're really just putting it out there," Freifeld said.

The submissions will be just one more input into the HealthMap model. The service sucks in all kinds of information and pumps it through algorithms that try to find signals in the noise. Freifeld said that as users submit useful information, they'll gain authority within the system. Over time, even a small number of reliable users could become an important, previously untapped resource.

Brownstein, who installed the app on the phones of willing workers at the Centers for Disease Control yesterday, said just a few hours after the public release of the app, they'd already received word of an illness at a school.

"I haven't even gotten back to the office, and we're already getting some pretty useful data," he said.

Obviously, Outbreaks Near Me won't replace existing tools for spotting disease, but like HealthMap itself, it could provide people with targeted warnings about impending health threats before the official channels can act on the problem.

"It's about empowering citizens in the cause of public health to both provide them with information and allow them to contribute information to share with others," Freifeld said.

Now, it's citizens' turn to decide just how engaged they'd actually like to be with public health — or whether they're OK with the professionals handling that whole swine flu tracking thing.

Images: 1. tukatuka/Flickr 2. Screenshot, Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com.

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