The healthcare based web application Sickweather recently opened its API to developers, giving programmers and researchers frictionless access to data.
Great talking to Graham Dodge, Co-Founder, and CEO of Sickweather and a leader in digital disease surveillance. Sickweather forecasts and maps sickness based on social media posts. Graham came up with the idea while at home sick with a stomach virus and noticing one of his friends posting about the same illness on a social media site.
The concept resonates with me because when I was marketing NyQuil many years ago, Richardson Vicks was purchasing data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on grade school absences to project cold and flu trends.
Sickweather has built a console for developers, and ad agencies, that want to access sickness data for marketing and analytics. Using Swagger as an open source console, endpoints are available for developers for frictionless access to data. HTTP endpoints return a JSON array that can be easily accessed for analysis. The console lets developers test endpoints with documentation.
Sickweather helps developers identify sickness trends on a hyper-local level with data going back at least 12 months.
The brand uses SAS analytics dashboards with APIs for a 15-week national flu forecast and a 15-week allergy forecast. The worst allergy season in years peaked last week. Based on past data, we should see another spike in allergies in the early fall.
In addition to ad agencies and marketing firms, pharmaceutical companies and students are accessing the data to verify hypotheses and explore trends.
Weather.com’s cold and flu map is powered by Sickweather.
The company is both acquiring datasets and growing its audience which its able to geotag once the app is downloaded. It’s able to correlate data with Nielsen OTC drug data, IoT devices, and clinical information that’s hyper-local and real-time.
