Sickweather app handy for travelers, parents
A screenshot from the Sickweather.com website shows localized real-time reports of illness.
iPhone screenshots show various features, including a Doppler-esque “radar” map and most-reported illnesses.
As Allegheny County health officials continue to warn residents they’re in the middle of a bad flu season, a website-turned-phone-application is allowing users to check when they’re in a “sick hot spot.” The Sickweather app, available as a free download on both Apple and Android phones since 2014, has recently been upgraded to provide illness “forecasts,” or maps of real-time concentrations of certain types of communicable diseases.
“The weather metaphor works well, because you see a map with clusters of spiking illnesses, much like a Doppler radar. And it provides a ‘forecast’ five days out,” said Sickweather CEO and co-founder Graham Dodge.
The website launched in November 2011 and has been growing its aggregated data from Facebook and Twitter ever since.
“We get about 2 million inputs a month,” Graham said from his Baltimore office, “and that’s a mix between the social media accounts and our own users submitting information.”
The app trawls social media for users offering updates on symptoms and explicit mentions of what they believe they have, or have been diagnosed with.
“This whole idea came about when I was sick with a stomach virus one day, and I had a newborn in the house, and I wanted to know if it was indeed a virus going around or food poisoning so I could decide to stay away or not. I went on Facebook and a friend in Washington, D.C., was reporting similar symptoms. So it dawned on me that this could be a platform to pull information from and use it also to distribute the information,” Graham said.
The biggest app feature for travelers and commuters, Graham said, was a mobile alert that notifies a user when they enter a concentrated sick “hot spot.”
The former crime statistics expert said the crowd-sourcing method for collecting illness data is a leap ahead of other reporting methods.
“Sharing is caring, certainly,” he said, “so when you post on Facebook or Twitter you’re feeling sick, or have a confirmed diagnosed illness, you’re aiding others and enabling them to avoid getting it … epidemics and illnesses have never been tracked like this before. The Centers for Disease Control reports are sometimes two weeks after any illness in the population; the viral life cycle is two weeks as well, so it doesn’t make sense to distribute or count on info that way if you want to prepare people.”