SEATTLE -- Summer is not usually when Seattlites worry about the flu, but the things we do to spread disease don't go away when the sun comes out.
It's why sickness is never far from Lauren Gold's mind.
"I'm a working parent," said Gold, who has a 7-year-old son, "and I need to know or do my best to not be out of work because my child is sick."
Gold said she's using a smartphone app called InFlu to record her symptoms wherever she goes, on a scale of zero to 10, from "no symptoms" to "high fever and chills."
The idea is to give "a global view of what's going on with infectious disease at this moment," said app co-creator Jim Huang.
Currently, it's up to doctors, labs and schools to report flu outbreaks, according to the Seattle-King County Health Department.
Huang said his app allows for anonymous, real-time data as accurate as 10 meters away, so you know "whether someone who is not feeling very good has been there in the last few hours," he said. "The idea is more to provide information that an individual [who] doesn't have a Ph.D. in microbiology can use."
During a recent contest sponsored by the National Centers for Disease Control, InFlu won the People's Choice award, which included a $2,500 prize.
But the app does have one catch: Because it runs on the honor system, you need a large crop of consistent and honest users checking in their status.
At this point, Huang said the number of those using the app is in the hundreds, and include people from all over the world.
"Past a certain point of number of users, we can do things like make predictions," Huang said, like "looking 12-24 hours in the future, how do we expect the flu to move around your city or globally."
Ultimately, that means InFlu needs to go viral to stay healthy, and that depends on if people see the benefits or worry about spreading panic.
"I think that would be good for an epidemiological study to assess what's going on," said Leo LeBlanc, who works in an alternative medicine store in Pike Place Market.
"Seems like it might play into somebody's... fear of being around people," said Carinn Boe, who lives in Capitol Hill.
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