Sickness Forecasting Service Launches First Video Forecast

An innovative location-based sickness forecasting service has launched the first of a weekly series of video forecasts.

Sickweather (Baltimore, MD, USA) is a social-media based website that shows in map-form the spread of disease. Using a patent-pending algorithm, updates and statuses on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter reporting illness (i.e., "I'm sick,” "the doc says I have bronchitis", and "My son has chickenpox”), when made publicly available by the user and containing location information, are tracked and mapped. The zoomable map can be examined for individual reports, down to street level.

Alternatively, Sickweather allows its members to report directly to the map anonymously via the input field under "How Are You Feeling Today?" The website will then match the report to the most relevant local forecasts. If the user reports symptoms or illnesses that are not being tracked, the information will be processed by the algorithm to automatically make suggestions for expanding tracking capabilities. When several reports appear nearby each other at approximately the same time, they are grouped as potential storm activity represented by orange polygons and lines; these may change as the user zooms in and the density becomes more refined.

The Sickweather start-up launched in November of 2011, and is hosted by a meteorologist, Justin Berk, and features an epidemiologist, Jennifer Schroeder, PhD. The pilot episode, posted as a video report on March 4, 2013, featured reports on flu, common cold, crud, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), allergies, and stomach viruses around the United States.

“We're really excited for people to see our forecasts in this format,” said Graham Dodge, CEO of Sickweather. “It's always been our goal to show our real-time sickness data like a weather forecast, and this really helps tie those themes together.”

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