LOUISVILLE, Ky. – A Kentucky middle school science class is tracking the flu and other illnesses in the school using a cell phone app with a thermometer attachment.

Seventh-graders in Caitlin Ousley’s science class at St. Leonard School are suing the Kinsa smartphone app and a special thermometer that plugs into a phone to take their temperature and log cold symptoms in an effort to spot trends and identify illnesses spreading through the school, WHAS reports.

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The school received a grant to purchase the $20 thermometers for all students and is now encouraging them to participate in the Kinsa project, which transfers their data to individual profiles where students also record their symptoms. The app then provides that data to everyone, anonymously.

“It also aggregates all the data from everybody who uses the app in the St. Leonard community so that we can see who has what illnesses and who has what symptoms,” Ousley said. It “shows what the different symptoms have been doing and trying to notice patterns.”

Students who spoke with WHAS were excited about sharing their symptoms.

“I think it is going to help us learn a lot about how sicknesses spread and how you can learn about how you get sick and what your symptoms are for some sicknesses,” Nia Gandolfo said.

“I never thought a thermometer would plug into a phone one day,” classmate Andrew Robello marveled.

The St. Leonard School is one of 500 nationwide that were selected out of thousands that applied to participate in the Kinsa FLUency program, which distributes the thermometers to schools for free.

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“Sick days are disruptive to learning, challenging for parents who must find childcare and costly to schools that are already struggling with strapped resources,” Kinsa founder and CEO Inder Singh said in a prepared statement.

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“In addition to the disruption, it is heartbreaking for both parents and kids with the household is hit with the flu. Since the thermometer is the first thing a parent reaches for when their child falls ill, we designed Kinsa to be smarter, capturing symptoms earlier and providing guidance on what to do next.”

Alisha Palmer, nurse at Jackson Park Elementary in Kannapolis, North Carolina, told the Independent Tribune 110 people have joined the school’s Kinsa group since she help launch the program a few weeks ago.

“The purpose of the FLUency program is actually to stop the spread of germs before they ever get to the school,” Palmer said. “So a big thing that I saw last year is that kids were coming in off the bus, and now they’ve already been on the bus for who knows how long in a contained space, and they came in, and they say, ‘I think I’m sick we didn’t have a thermometer. Mom wants you to check my temperature,’

“Empowering these parents was actually allowing them to catch things earlier, keep the children home, in turn decreasing the sick number of days missed overall for the entire school with not spreading it.”

The app also has a message board where parents and school officials can post anonymously about developing illnesses at school, including diagnosis or symptoms, and receive advice on how to proceed.

“Every time I talk to someone, they’ve ordered it or they’re getting it or they’ve set it up,” Palmer said. “So we’re definitely moving in the right direction. Every person that I’ve talked to so far is really loving it. It’s a really cool program. We’re very, very excited.”

Kinsa states it “cannot guarantee the security of data sent to us electronically on our Site or through our Application, and transmission of such data is therefore entirely at your own risk.”

According to the Kinsa website:

The information that we collect and store relating to you is primarily used to enable us to provide our Site and Application to you in the best possible manner. In addition, we may use the information to provide you with additional information relating to our Site or Application or to monitor and conduct an analysis of our Site and Application traffic and usage.

We also merge other sources and other anonymous and aggregate demographic data with data we collect from you to derive mathematically modelled aggregate data (“Kinsa, Inc. Aggregate Data”), which is used to get a real-time understanding of and predict the prevalence of the spread of illnesses within a specific geographic area. NO PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION IS INCLUDED IN THIS DATA WHEN IT IS SHARED. …

We may disclose your information to third parties
i. Where we sell any or all of our business and/or our assets to a third party.
ii. Where we are legally required to disclose your information.
iii. When we are contractually obligated to disclose it.
Where applicable, we may also disclose some of your information to our affiliates if necessary for us to provide the features of our Site or Application to you.