Monitoring flu with a GIS application

Apparently, germs have been hopping around on campus lately. It is not very pleasant to see all your colleagues and students sneezing and aching. Hopefully, it is just an ordinary flu, not the ones associated with a swine or a bird or any other non-human creature.

This article from Technology Review reports a rather brilliant and free ipod application. Outbreaks Near Me allows individuals to monitor location based data about reported cases of epidemic diseases.

Such location based information is made available with the development of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technologies. Today there are many ways that GIS can be utilized, and yet many more are on the way.

What I liked even more about using GIS as an ipod application is that the users can report flu cases around their neighborhood and help update the data. With this wisdom of crowds, information grows even faster than it would have with official institutions.

Absolutely loved the idea. I wonder about the reliability of the data though...