• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, January 29, 2016

It's winter and people are falling like flies. So it's timely that Sickweather, developer of a real-time map of illness, on Friday announced it has opened its cognitive API (application programming interface) for disease surveillance to outside developers. The Sickweather apps provide "sick zone alerts" via mobile phones.

Baltimore-based Sickweather has already been working with Swaive (developer of the Smart Therrmometer app), Johnson & Johnson (Healthy Day app) and AccuWeather (StoryTeller broadast TV platform).

"Our goal is to get more healthcare companies and other entities to plug in Sickweather to understand where real-time sickness trends are. It could help them do pre-diagnoses, and they can also share real-time data in a global database," Graham Dodge, Sickweather's CEO, told Real-Time Daily.

One of the main challenges in tracking the spread of contagious illness is that takes at least two weeks to collect data from hospitals, clinics and public health agencies. So Sickweather developed a process to gather public reports via social media platforms where people post items like "I'm sick" or "My son has come down with strep," gathering all the information in real time. The system makes judgement calls using machine learning, offering alerts via its apps about disease outbreaks.

"Once we know where all the data is coming from, it can be geo-tagged or geo-located to a city or town, and even specific areas in cities and towns where contagion exists. And we can geo-fence the data and then the phone knows where the problem or outbreak is," Dodge explained. Sickweather assigns a "sick score," an algorithm that can tell you in real time what the disease threat is in a particular locale.