AirRater is a smartphone app designed to support people with asthma and allergies to better manage their health. The app provides users with up to date, local information on environmental conditions, including air pollution, pollen and temperature. Users can also log their asthma/allergy or other health symptoms and develop a personal profile of what their environmental triggers are.
The key goals of the app are to:
- Support individuals to make more informed decisions about their activities and what they might need to do to protect their health.
- By empowering individuals, to reduce the health impacts of air quality, pollen and extreme weather at a community scale
- To support public health and air quality agencies by providing a mechanism for (a) information dissemination and (b) symptom surveillance.
- Support research by providing a novel database of crowd-sourced health symptoms matched with environmental data.
We currently have over 50,000 users in Australia and our first analyses of AirRater symptom data have helped us discover some interesting links between native pollen types and asthma and allergy symptoms. With more users logging more symptoms, we will be able to expand our research across Australia.