New Smartphone app to alert local illnesses

GRANGER, Ind. -- A newly released Smartphone app wants to warn people of sicknesses in their area. It is called Sickweather.

Just like weather and traffic radars, the new Sickweather app is tracking illnesses in your neighborhood and alerting you with one click on your phone.

Lynn Browne says it seems beneficial.

“It’s to the advantage of the public to have something like that. Because if I knew the area had a certain number of flu cases I might avoid a restaurant in that area.”

The app lets its user choose four different kinds of illnesses to track—respiratory, gastrointestinal, environmental, and childhood.

You can also get alerted to individual illnesses as well, like allergies, common cold, and cough.

But the app gets its data from social media sites where people have complained about a particular illness, not from hospitals or doctors reports.

Doctor Matthew Teters says this app could be beneficial, but sometimes people incorrectly self diagnose.

“If these are being reported by patients, sometimes there’s a difference in opinion of what it means to have the flu or what it means to have different things.” A

nd unfortunately, that could make a lot of this application’s data incorrect.

The doctor says this app could be best suited to track illnesses in different regions as opposed to just intersections where an illness was reported.