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UW seeks 25,000 volunteers to try outbreak app

Coronavirus app
Smartphone app
All that’s needed to participate in the HIPPOCRATIC experiment is an Android or Apple smartphone with an internet connection. (UW Medicine via YouTube)

Can a smartphone app generate an early warning for an outbreak of coronavirus, flu, colds or other infections? A project funded by the Pentagon with an assist from the University of Washington aims to find out.

UW Medicine is recruiting 25,000 people nationwide for an app-based experiment called HIPPOCRATIC (which stands for Health and Injury Prediction and Prevention Using Complex Reasoning and Analytic Techniques Integrated on a Cellphone App … with a bit of poetic license.).

The app is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which serves as the Pentagon’s technological think tank.

If the app does what researchers hope, it could provide data for quicker medical diagnoses, and keep people who are ill from returning to school, work or military duty too soon.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

By Alan Boyle

Mastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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