Ever sit next to someone on a train or bus and they're coughing up a lung beside you and you're thinking, "Oh, god, this person is totally going to infect me?" And then, but 24 hours later, you have that funny feeling in your throat and not long after you're bed-ridden slurping Dayquil? Well, sometimes not all the warning signs are there. Sometimes the people around you look perfectly healthy, but are in fact, rampant with contagious viruses.
But don't worry, there's now a mobile app for sensing sickness in the air. Sickweather, a Baltimore-based startup, developed the app for Apple iOS. It is designed to detect "sick zones," aka areas that are ridden with illness. It's neat, but it's not the breakthrough technology you may be thinking it is. Rather than working as a kind of sensory thermometer that can pick up and read people's sick signals, it's tied into social media. The app tunes into feeds on Twitter and Facebook and homes in on people's comments that pertain to sickness. For instance, if Debbie in Pasadena has a head cold and takes to Twitter to gripe about it using a key illness word like "coughing," and then other people in Debbie's condo start tweeting about their "headaches" and "chest pains," Sickweather gathers these laments and labels the Pasadena condominium on its map of contaminated areas, so to speak.
Ideally though, the app will work on a much broader level, alerting people heading to airports or schools when an outbreak is in the works so that users can reconsider going to such glaringly infected places. Or, having such information could prompt other actions.
Graham Dodge, CEO & co-founder of Sickweather, says that what users do once alerted of a sick zone is "up to them," adding: “It could prompt you to wash your hands, get a vaccine, buy medication, or take other preventive measures to boost your immune system, but ultimately we believe that the net effect of this new, real-time awareness will help reduce the spread of illness and reduce healthcare costs.”
The Sickweather app is available in the App Store as a free download.
