Healthyday, the first app to use Sickweather?s health application program interface (API), scans social networks for indicators of illness, and maps real time data on more than 23 different symptoms and illnesses. The app points to mobile?s ability to put useful data in people?s hands to stop outbreaks in their tracks.

?Our real-time data can really help prevent full blown outbreaks, even if our alerts simply prompt people to wash hands more often as the outbreaks are starting,? said Graham Dodge, CEO of Sickweather, Baltimore, MD. ?Currently, most public health alerts are sent weeks after outbreaks have already started, but if more people have access to our data form our app, or our partners? apps, then those people can stay ahead of the spread of illness and help prevent it from spreading to others.?

Sickweather?s sick zone alerts are a convergence of a few technical capabilities: the company?s patent-pending process for distilling reports of illness from social media and its own users, geofencing that data into sick zones for the mobile device to know where those boundaries exist, and leveraging the local notifications API within iOS.

The Healthyday app is available in the App Store as a free download.

The user can simply turn off or on alerts for the 23 different symptoms and illnesses that the app tracks, depending on what?s relevant to them.  

For example, a mom with a newborn or kids in day care may want to be notified for croup, hand foot and mouth disease and fifth disease, whereas a healthy adult male with no kids might not want to be notified for those illnesses and may prefer to just be alerted for strep and flu. 

Once those alerts are set, the user can literally forget about the app until they enter a sick zone for one of those illnesses and then receives an alert.

They can then tap that alert to open the app and see where they are in proximity to the illnesses that they want to watch out for. 

If they happen to also have a symptom, they can easily share their own reports directly and anonymously through the app with the rest of the Sickweather community. 

The app is based on research work with advisors from Johns Hopkins University. Their investigation looks at the correlation between the anecdotal reports that Sickweather tracks from its community and from social media. 

Researchers have found a near-perfect correlation between reports of flu from Twitter and CDC?s Influenza Like Illness data.

That is to say that the anecdotal data closely matches the clinical data, with the inherent benefit of being available in real-time as opposed to the clinical data, which can take weeks to gather and process.

Healthcare is one of the industries that stands to benefit the most from mobile technology. And mobile has the potential to have a bigger impact in healthcare and wellness than any other industry. 

There is no other category where the stakes are higher, both from a human and a business perspective. 

?As she tells the story, she normally wouldn?t assume it was something bacterial, but this time she recalled the strep throat alert from Sickweather and took her son to get a throat culture. He tested positive for strep, so she was able to get him on antibiotics sooner, so he could go back to school and she could get back to work. 

?Had she not received that alert from us, she says she would?ve probably let him go to school assuming it was just a cold, which had the potential to be even more disruptive as the illness progressed,? he said. ?Sickweather?s mobile alerts helped her proactively manage that situation.?