GERMCAST INFLUENZA GERMCAST Influenza is a unique web application designed for iPhone and Android mobile devices that uses your current GPS coordinates to give you personalized information and forecasts for influenza relative to your current location. Information includes influenza outbreak forecasts, your personal risk level, graphs of activity for your region, environmental conditions that contribute to the spread of influenza, information about the number of GERMCAST users in your area that have the flu, locations of nearby clinics, as well as tailored alerts, and podcasts, prevention information and RSS feeds from the CDC. GERMCAST informs the user about risks, which encourages vaccination before it’s too late. INFLUENZA RISK: GERMCAST calculates a current risk based on your location, using local and regional activity and weather conditions. GERMCAST uses your profile information to determine your personal risk level during a given time of year based on the current level of influenza activity in your area. It also gives you personalized recommendations and alerts regarding vaccination, prompting you to talk to your doctor about vaccination if you have contraindications to the vaccine. Clicking on the “I” sign next to personal risk gives you a list of your own personal influenza related risk factors. Statewide activity information from the CDC is also shown in the top risk panel. You can also see how many GERMCAST users in your area have the flu or flu like symptoms. Vaccination alerts are generated if you are not vaccinated and it is flu season. By going to the ALERT section you can see your vaccination alerts and click to find vaccination clinics near you based on your GPS location. If Google flu vaccine finder is down the application finds vaccine clinics near you using Google maps. This feature has been activated outside of flu season in this version to show how it works. FORECASTING: Forecasts are shown for outbreaks in your region 1 week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks in advance using information from regional activity as well as activity from surrounding regions and historical data taking into consideration patterns of spread across the US. Naïve Bayes models were trained using historical influenza data obtained from the CDC website and data is updated on our server weekly to prepare the next training dataset for the next year. Each year the model essentially learns from experience becoming more accurate with time. Different prediction models are constructed for each region, current prediction models are averaging over 90% accuracy on test data. The forecasting models used in this application were partly based on my masters work in biomedical informatics using Naïve Bayes models to predict respiratory syncytial virus outbreaks. INFLUENZA ACTIVITY GRAPH: GERMCAST provides a graph of influenza activity in your region from data gathered from the CDC website. GERMCAST captures CDC data and graphs it instantly so you can always see an updated graph of influenza activity for your region. Also included is a link to Google Flu Trends. ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS: Temperature and humidity have been shown in many studies to be associated with influenza transmission contributing to outbreaks during winter in temperate regions. This panel gives you information about the risk of transmission based on current environmental conditions. RESEARCH TOOL: GERMCAST also serves as a research tool. Users are given the option in their personal profile to allow GERMCAST to store information about their usage of the application for research purposes. No personal identifiers are stored, only information regarding the users usage of the application, their risk status and location are stored. INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE:
- Open your web browser on your iPhone or Android device.
- In your browser go to m.germcast.com or mobile.germcast.com
- You will see two pop ups one will ask if it is ok to share your location with the GERMCAST application. For GERMCAST to work correctly you must allow the application access to your location. The other panel asks about your influenza infection status and vaccination status, correctly answering these questions updates the GERMCAST network.
- Click on PERSONAL PROFILE to update your information so GERMCAST can calculate your risk and provide customized alerts.
- To access any of the features in germcast touch the green button with an arrow in it to expand that feature. Touching it again will hide that feature.
- Enjoy using the free application and help build the GERMCAST network. NOTES: It may take GERMCAST a few seconds to load initially as it registers your coordinates and puts builds a report based on your location. Before getting an accurate personal risk assessment you must click on personal profile and update your information. GERMCAST may also work on other mobile devices besides iPhone/Android and personal computers through your web browser. However GERMCAST has not been tested on those devices and may behave unexpectedly. Keep in mind this is version 1.0, although the best efforts have been made to make it bug free, I was unable to test it in all environments. If GERMCAST is not working correctly it probably does not have access to your location. If this happens refresh your browser and click yes when the popup asks if it is ok to access your location.
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