Widespread diseases are very difficult to stop, but technology developed in Rochester will aid in the fight against disease.

TechRepublic reports that the University of Rochester has a new app called nEmesis, which will help fight the spread of diseases.

The app uses natural language processing, social media, and artificial intelligence to locate tweets relating to food poisoning and pinpoint the source of a potential outbreak. GeoTagging technology enables this app to find the exact location of the source.

Researchers tested the nEmesis app in Las Vegas, where they located infected areas via their algorithm and gave the city a list of places where they suspected illnesses to be present.

According to the National Science Foundation, the Rochester-developed system scanned an average of 16,000 tweets from 3,600 users every day. About 1,000 of those tweets led back to specific restaurants which were used to generate a list of places to perform inspections.

After analyzing the experiment, researchers found the nEmesis app led to citations for health violations in 15% of inspections, compared to only 9% that utilize the traditional random-based inspection approach.

The United States Public Health Service has more than 6,000 full-time, highly qualified health professionals who are dedicated to the nation’s public health and disease prevention. An app like nEmesis will surely improve efficiency in such organizations.

Foodborne illness affects more than 48 million people in the U.S. every year, this app will help prevent many of those cases by narrowing down a health inspection list.

Adam Sadilek, a member of the research team who worked on nEmesis, stated on GCN, “This case shows how you can use public data to improve public health.”

After the Las Vegas experiment, researchers concluded that this technology can lead to an estimated 9,000 fewer food poisoning cases in Las Vegas.

Senior environmental health specialist Lauren DiPrete stated, “nEmesis has proved to be a useful tool for quickly and accurately identifying facilities in need of support, education, or regulation by the health department.”

Developers of the app believe that this technology could potentially prevent many more diseases as well.