Your phone can do so much for you nowadays—including keep you in the peak of health by steering you away from restaurants that might give you food poisoning.
Developed by researchers at the University of Rochester, nEmesis is a new app that combines restaurant coordinates with data from Twitter in order to identify possible places that have caused food poisoning. The app can be used both to warn users away from unhealthy or unclean restaurants, and as a potential way to alert health department officials that a restaurant has a high number of food-poisoning incidents and might need to be inspected. The app takes all the guesswork out of going to a new restaurant.
nEmesis app from University of Rochester
nEmesis combs through the GPS data accessible through Twitter and cross references the data with restaurant coordinates. The app then tags related users and analyzes their tweets for a period of about 72 hours, analyzing their tweets for signs of food poisoning symptoms. nEmesis’s system watches out for keywords such as “threw up” or “tummy ache,” any word that might indicate the user is experiencing symptoms. nEmesis then rates the restaurants ‘ levels of food safety and will even display tweets that flag the restaurant as a potential risk.
The app uses Twitter’s capability for noteworthy news by consolidating the data into once source, an idea that other app developers should certainly look into.
The nEmesis developers identified about 23,000 restaurants and detected around 480 possible cases of food poisoning in just four months. They gave each restaurant a “health score” based on the restaurant’s number of food poisonings, with their results correlated by scores from the health department.
The nEmesis research is available on the University of Rochester’s page.
Source Psfk.com
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