Dive Brief:
- Researchers from Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have created an app they say can help predict the spread of the flu, BizJournals reports.
- The researchers are calling the app "game-changing," asserting it can help providers identify at-risk patients and reach out to them before they contract the flu.
- The app, iEpi, is based on an epidemiological model that predicts transferrence of the flu virus by tracking students' whereabouts and the people they come across.
Dive Insight:
Think of this app as a real-time epidemological tracker. Once a student is tagged as having contracted the flu, and others who live in their vicinity or attend classes with them may be warned about the risk of illness.
This is just one illustration of a burgeoning trend in health IT and wearable medical devices. Real-time monitoring through mobile apps is being harnessed to give providers a leg-up on illnesses — and, in this case, even a tool for preventing illness.
"It’s really important in the field of medicine in general to capture information on a shorter time scale than information that has been captured in the past," said Duke's Katherine Heller, a statistician who helped lead the project. "Your mobile phone, that’s a mechanism for you to enter information about your health on a second-by-second basis.
"Because we can collect data on that small time scale and because we can collect data of a new, individualized kind, we can better make predictions," she said.