6 UW apps that put health care in your hands

AeroSpec

A healthy high school athlete suddenly falls ill, but doctors struggle to find the cause. Eventually, they nail an unlikely culprit: a fungus along her regular running route.

Real-time information about air pollutants and allergens could have replaced months of isolation and testing. That’s why Jiayang (Joe) He and Sep Makhsous, as UW engineering doctoral students, developed AeroSpec. By combining government air quality data with personalized readings from a small portable monitor, their app creates a custom map to show where the user is exposed to pollutants and allergens.

“The three things people are concerned with are mold, dust and pollution,” says Makhsous, now a postdoctoral fellow at CoMotion. “We want to give them a location where it’s happening, so they can take the appropriate action to stay healthy.”

With a $50,000 grant from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, the team is turning a UW research project into a viable commercial product. They’ve conducted interviews with pulmonologists, pediatricians and people with airborne sensitivities, to understand the needs — and they’re ready to test the app widely in preparation for its release.

The Bilingual Pesticide Safety Project

Although most Washington farmworkers are Spanish speakers, critical pesticide-safety information is primarily in English. Misapplied pesticides can make workers sick, cause environmental harm or result in financial losses for growers.

A pair of mobile apps from the Etiquetas bilingües de pesticidas/Bilingual Pesticide Safety Project are designed to mitigate those risks. Developed by the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, the apps provide a searchable database of the safety and handling information for pesticides commonly used in Washington state, with Spanish translations.

The Bilingual Pesticide Safety team extracts the label’s relevant details, translating and adding them to the databases. The apps work offline, so they can be used in the field without an internet connection, though neither replaces the official safety information.

“When people have the right information, they can do their job properly — and management has more confidence,” says Kit Galvin, a research scientist and principal investigator on the project. Farm managers who tested one of the apps said it helped them effectively explain the pesticide safety measures to their workers.

One of the apps — ¡Etiquetas de pesticidas, ahora!/Pesticide Labels, Now! — covers 40 pesticides often used in Washington’s apple and pear orchards. The other, PestiSeguro/PestiSafe, will include many pesticides and cover most WA specialty crops. It may expand beyond the state.

Available: ¡Etiquetas de pesticidas, ahora!/Pesticide Labels, Now! is available now from Apple and Google. PestiSeguro/PestiSafe will be available in 2021.

EarHealth

It’s the middle of the night. Your toddler is fussy and keeps rubbing her ear. Bleary-eyed and half-awake, you struggle to figure out if your child needs a doctor’s visit and possibly medication.

A piece of paper and a smartphone app could help you decide.

EarHealth, designed by a team of UW computer scientists and ear, nose and throat doctors, checks for fluid behind the eardrum — a common symptom of ear infections.

The user cuts and folds a regular piece of paper into a small funnel, then attaches one end to the phone’s speaker with the other end next to the ear. The app sends a chirping sound through the ear canal and analyzes the echo to determine if fluid has built up behind the ear.

“The app only takes two seconds in each ear,” explains Randy Bly, an assistant professor of head and neck surgery at the UW School of Medicine. His team has found that children are willing to participate “because it’s on a smartphone and it’s interesting to them — the acoustic chirps sound somewhat like a bird.”

Diagnosing ear infections can be difficult, especially in children who have trouble describing their symptoms. The EarHealth app is easy to use and accurate. In a test at Seattle Children’s Hospital, the app’s algorithm correctly identified the presence of fluid 85% of the time.