1. Get people to tell you when they're sick and what symptoms they have.
2. Get access to their social network (facebook app, email contact list, etc) and figure out who they got their cold from.
3. Tell users who got them sick and what they should expect (e.g., "looks like you picked up Joe's cold, but don't worry -- it's mild and you should recover by the weekend").
Possible future directions:
1. Given enough users, you could do a very good job of tracking influenza or other rapidly spreading infectious diseases.
2. Have people tell you what medicines they tried and what worked / didn't work (very useful in the context of antibiotics).
Monetize via advertising (good rates in the medical field) or by referrals to drug stores which sell cold medicine. Get publicity by publishing statistics (e.g., "looks like the flu season has started in California, but hasn't hit New England yet").
That site has been around for awhile, and I think the biggest problem is sick people don't generally feel like going online and contributing open data projects. The geekiest among us might, but most people just want to lie on the couch and watch movies and sip ginger ale when their sick -- not get online and log their symptoms and recovery time.
What might work is getting mother's to record data about their sick children or doctors to record aggregate data about their patients. Neither of those groups will want to (or in the case of doctors are legally able to) share specific information about the people who are sick, but the data about what's going around your town could be valuable to you as a parent or as a patient (and to other doctors and the CDC).
I wanted to do that for Twitter, just for fun :-) Wouldn't even require active participation, because presumably most people Twitter about feeling sick anyway.
It should be mentioned that Google already does some kind of flu tracking, too. Too lazy to look for the link, but I think they pick up on increased searches for flu related stuff, and show it on a map and with trend charts.
Comments
"I have your cold".
1. Get people to tell you when they're sick and what symptoms they have. 2. Get access to their social network (facebook app, email contact list, etc) and figure out who they got their cold from. 3. Tell users who got them sick and what they should expect (e.g., "looks like you picked up Joe's cold, but don't worry -- it's mild and you should recover by the weekend").
Possible future directions: 1. Given enough users, you could do a very good job of tracking influenza or other rapidly spreading infectious diseases. 2. Have people tell you what medicines they tried and what worked / didn't work (very useful in the context of antibiotics).
Monetize via advertising (good rates in the medical field) or by referrals to drug stores which sell cold medicine. Get publicity by publishing statistics (e.g., "looks like the flu season has started in California, but hasn't hit New England yet").
That sounds like http://whoissick.org/sickness/ with Facebook Connect.
That site has been around for awhile, and I think the biggest problem is sick people don't generally feel like going online and contributing open data projects. The geekiest among us might, but most people just want to lie on the couch and watch movies and sip ginger ale when their sick -- not get online and log their symptoms and recovery time.
What might work is getting mother's to record data about their sick children or doctors to record aggregate data about their patients. Neither of those groups will want to (or in the case of doctors are legally able to) share specific information about the people who are sick, but the data about what's going around your town could be valuable to you as a parent or as a patient (and to other doctors and the CDC).
I wanted to do that for Twitter, just for fun :-) Wouldn't even require active participation, because presumably most people Twitter about feeling sick anyway.
It should be mentioned that Google already does some kind of flu tracking, too. Too lazy to look for the link, but I think they pick up on increased searches for flu related stuff, and show it on a map and with trend charts.
This is funny to me for some reason, but still a good idea!
cool Idea and really useful.
that's a good one!