A new mobile app called HEALTHYDAY promises to “take the guesswork out” of your health symptoms by determining what illnesses nearby people may have. It can show you where the most cold, flu, and allergy symptoms are present.
Created by McNeil Consumer Healthcare Division, a Johnson & Johnson product company, the app uses an algorithm to identify trending illnesses in an area and send alerts to local users. Its algorithm aggregates information from doctors, Google searches, social media, and crowd-sourced data from self-reporting users.
Users can see if people in their neighborhood are sick and what they may have, and are encouraged to take precautions to avoid sickness. For example, in downtown Washington, D.C., the app shows 19 reported cases of allergies, 19 of a cough, and 4 sinus infections, each displayed as a location pin on a map. A pull-up information bar answers common questions and tells users about precipitation, humidity, and pollen count, among other things.
For now, HEALTHYDAY allows users to report conditions like the common cold, flu, strep throat, pink eye, bronchitis, and chicken pox. The company behind the app also creates over-the-counter products like Zyrtec and Tylenol intended to treat some symptoms of those common ailments.
Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak in the United States and the more recent MERS outbreak in South Korea, public health concerns involving the transmission and spread of disease have come to the forefront. One of the three main reasons MERS was able to infect large numbers of people so quickly is because it was unexpected and physicians were unprepared to track it, according to the World Health Organization.
So, in light of recent outbreaks, the world is looking at mHealth — defined as the use of mobile technologies to support and advance health care and health systems — as a potential solution for global health care problems in 2015. Mobile phones and apps could hold promise for preventing and controlling the spread of infectious diseases like Ebola, according to IntraHealth, an international health worker organization.
HEALTHDAY works locally to identify less life-threatening sicknesses than Ebola and MERS, but shows potential for mHealth advancements on a larger scale. Its infrastructure, which links information from medical professionals, Internet and social media, and users of the app, could be used to disseminate information like public health alerts and precautions. And disease transmission is very preventable, especially if health workers can use fast-working technology to communicate information and warnings with each other and the general public.
Some experts, however, are wary of the potential negative side effects of mobile health apps. For instance, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta argues that apps that store health data could impact privacy. Gupta cited a data breach protection agency that found that the health care industry experienced more data breaches than ever before in 2013, accounting for 43 percent of all breaches that year. If security doesn’t improve, Gupta warns that Americans’ privacy, identity, and personal information may be put at risk.
HEALTHYDAY’s privacy policy acknowledges that “Unfortunately, no Internet transmission is ever completely secure or error-free.” It also mentions that the app administrators use and disclose collected information as they believe “to be necessary or appropriate.”
Although privacy and security remain issues for mHealth apps, some experts in the field think that in the long run, apps like HEALTHYDAY can do their part to improve health care. Research has found that mobile technology has had a positive effect on users and their health care regiments.
Rajiv Leventhal, a writer at Healthcare Informatics, an information website for health professionals, points out that patient-generated information could fill gaps in health data collection. “Challenges aside,” Leventhal writes, “the potential for mHealth tools to help with care management is certainly there — a sentiment shared by many in the industry.”
Rupali Srivastava is an intern with ThinkProgress.