Three helpful mobile apps for people with allergies!

Everyday we see new patients who come to us because they think they have allergies.  It’s important to us not only treat our patients, but also provide our patients with education and tools to help them successfully live life with allergies. (Reason number 234 why we aren’t just another allergy practice! We understand out patients and want to help them in today’s modern times. )

According to Pew Research, as of 2013, 56% of American adults are now smartphone owners. With such a high adoption rate, mobile applications are continually created to help satisfy a need or provide a way to make life easier. This concept has been applied to people with allergies, as new applications are being build every day to help people with food and pollen allergies.

Here are three mobile applications that we’d recommend every person with allergies have on their smart phone:

UPC Food Scanner

This is a great mobile application that detects and identifies allergy related ingredients on barcodes and labels of packaged food products. This application allows you to identify and “tag” your particular food allergies, for example, milk, nuts, shellfish. Then, when you scan a bar code on a food product, it'll tell you if your allergy is in the ingredients. The one thing that you need to keep in mind is that it doesn’t let you know if a product was made in a facility with shared equipment or cross contamination warnings for listed with ingredients.

This application is available for download on an iPhone and iPad to make shopping for groceries that much easier for people who have food allergies.  Click here to learn more about UPC Food Scanner.

AllergyCast

As fall is just around the corner, many of our patients ask us to recommend a website or phone application we’d suggest using to track pollen levels.  Our answer is AllergyCast by Zyrtec.  But, in addition to checking pollen levels, the AllergyCast app also allows you to check the weather, log your allergy symptoms and track how you’re feeling. This can be a really helpful tool to keep track of what’s happen in terms of pollen counts, but also how the pollen levels (and which in particular) are affecting you!!

Click here to download the phone app, which is available on both iPhone as well as Android devices.

 

Leafsnap App

The LeafSnap phone application was developed by University of Maryland, Smithsonian Institute and Columbia University to help turn users into LeafSnap citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.

It uses a proprietary database that can determine the type of tree just by taking a photograph of a leaf. This is a perfect phone app for those people with springtime tree allergies. This app will help you learn to recognize what trees you are allergic to so that you can try to avoid sitting under one during your weekend picnic in Central Park.

This app is available for iPhone and iPad users. Click here to download.

If you are looking for more information about allergies or have questions about other resources available to people with allergies, give us a call. We can be reached at 212-729-1283 or send us an email at info@hudsonallergy.com.