New App Tracks The Flu And Allergies Coming For You Only Blocks Away

The worst part of a sniffle or a sore throat is wondering what it is you’re coming down with — the type of casual paranoia that keeps WebMD and Google searches in business.

A new app, called HEALTHYDAY, comes from a division of Johnson & Johnson and uses sickness-searching algorithms to take the guesswork out of your hypochondria by warning you when the flu is overtaking your neighborhood or pollen is driving allergies sky-high. as a kind of subtle advertising for its products. The basic health tips the app offers up don’t outright tell you which medicines to buy — instead they are each “brought to you” by one of the company’s over-the-counter brands, which include Zyrtec and Tylenol.

In San Francisco, for example, the app warns of a particularly high risk of allergies and cold symptoms and a middling likelihood of the flu.

Click on one of the roughly 150 user reports in the city and you can see the exact symptoms or affliction each one reported — down to the street where the report was made.

Eric Weisberg, executive creative director at ad agency JWT New York, has lofty goals for the app — he makes comparisons to navigation app Waze and Google maps in terms of its mobile-friendliness and location-targeting. He said a simple Google search for symptoms can leave people bogged down with too much information.

“We’re looking to transform what’s sort of a search-and-confusion mentality to discovering what’s going on with your sniffles to really getting a content-first, actionable information second,” he said.

The team wants to expand the app’s features with more ailments and information once it has a bigger user base.