Tech Tuesday: Tracking Swine Flu

As if helping you catch the guy that stole your phone wasn’t enough, now the iPhone can actually help you track cases of swine flu (and other infectious diseases).

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the MIT Media Lab released the “Outbreaks Near Me” application Sept.1, combining the phone’s GPS with Healthmap.org, a web crawler that “mines official and unofficial Internet data sources for information on outbreaks of emerging, infectious diseases,” according to an article in The Harvard Crimson. It is available for free in the iTunes store.

“If people know what’s happening around them, they might be more likely to take basic precautions,” such as washing their hands and getting vaccinated, Healthmap co-founder John S. Brownstein told The Crimson.

And another local swine flu update – Swine Flu’s First Death occurred in College Ave.’s hometown of Ithaca New York. A junior at Cornell University died last Friday because of complications related to the H1N1 virus. See campus reaction and  who is not talking.

Posted September 15, 2009 at 11:37 pm by Erica R. Hendry | Share on Facebook
Categories: Tech Tuesdays

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