Graham Dodge, the founder and CEO of Sickweather, is less than thrilled that a company appears to have ripped off its logo and latest app name in Apple’s iTunes iStore. Sickweather has a mobile health app that filters social media chatter to identify public health trends.
What’s particularly galling is that it hoped to use the recent mHealth summit to show off its latest app developed for companies to predict in advance disease trends affecting their employees. It’s also intended to give hospitals more tools to prepare for flu and other illnesses in their communities.
A company called Tube Emoji is using Sickweather’s logo in Apple’s App Store, Dodge said. Emoji is a Japanese word that describes smileys and emoticons that have been widely adopted in many forms of communication from mobile phones to Unicode.
Although the description of the Sickweather Pro on the store’s website claims to be a Doppler radar for sickness, the store categorizes the app for weather and art from the app only shows weather radar images of storms. Sickweather is designed to use social media to track illness trends in cities and towns around the U.S. and its appearance is much different.
Sickweather’s actual app looks much different in iTunes.
If you click on the link to Tube Emoji’s website in the app store, it takes you to the Moviefone website.
Apple has come in for criticism for the way it screens apps for its store in recent years, as have Android and Windows. Apple’s iTunes website includes a statement on piracy prevention and directs people to report problems.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
It’s a reminder of some of the very real risks facing the digital health sector as companies push for physicians to prescribe apps. Better security and constantly improving the vetting process beyond a buyer beware policy are a critical part of instilling confidence in health apps.
