Health

Chicago Developers: US Department of Labor Launches Smartphone App Contest Around Fair Labor

Smart Chicago

My colleague Matt Bruce pointed me to this new app contest: US Department of Labor launches smartphone app contest. Here’s a snip:

The DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge, which can be accessed at http://fairlabor.challenge.gov, calls for creating a smartphone app that integrates the department’s publicly available enforcement data with consumer ratings websites, geo-positioning Web tools, and other relevant data sets, such as those available from state health boards.  The winning app is expected to be creative, innovative, easy to use, and will incorporate data from http://ogesdw.dol.gov/index.

“The app we would like to see developed would work with existing social media and would allow consumers to see if an establishment that they want to frequent has been in compliance with federal labor laws,” said Laura Fortman, principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division. “The app could also prove a useful tool for job seekers and for companies that are deciding which firms they may want to do business with.  It could also help individuals get in touch with the Labor Department if they have any questions.  As we mark 75 years of the job protections afforded by the FLSA, we are looking forward to using new technologies to encourage compliance with the law in the 21st century.”

DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge

Matt runs the just-launched Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance (CWFA) that is housed here at the Chicago Community Trust, just like Smart Chicago. One of the issues he’s working on is the deterioration of labor standards in low-wage work.

roc-national-diners-guideA national group called Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROCUnited) has the ROC National Diners Guide, which is an app that shows national data around labor practices around national food chains. It would be great if we could see all local restaurants, allow patrons and employees to report issues, and include local labor data in an app that takes this concept further. There is great leadership here at Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago (ROC-Chicago) as well.

I’d be happy to look into the types of data available at state, county, and city sources that could be used in such a system  I think this would be a great use of civic technology energy and I hope to find some co-collaborators on this, If you have any ideas or are working on similar issues, hit me up at [email protected].

Chicago Health Atlas Data Feeds

Smart Chicago

Today we’ve added support for querying the data that appears on Chicago Health Atlas by adding JSON endpoints for the major pages. If you want to get access to the underlying data that drives our maps and charts, just add “.json” to the URL of pretty much any page and we’ve got you covered.

Examples:

You can see all community area and zip code boundaries in Chicago by eyeballing our map:

Chicago Health Atlas Map

Or you can see the raw data http://www.chicagohealthatlas.org/places.json:

Chicago Health Atlas Places JSON

You can see all birth rate data by year or see the data all at once.
Birth rate data for the Loop area with confidence intervals as json.

Thanks to Dan Sinker and Cory Nissen for asking for this feature and Derek Eder for getting it done lickety-split.

 

 


See also Cory’s method for querying this site– thanks for doing this, Cory.

Have at it!

The Launch of Chicago Health Atlas

Smart Chicago

Today we’re happy to announce the launch of our latest project, the Chicago Health Atlas, where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

The Chicago Health Atlas is a place where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

You can read all about the making of the Chicago Health Atlas on our project page. It’s quite a story of collaboration. We pulled sprawling amounts of city-wide health data into a cohesive view of health near you.

  • It all starts with Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute, the project funder, and Jim Alexander, the Institute’s Executive Director and the conceptual leader behind the project
  • We worked with Abel Kho and some of the largest providers of health care in Chicago to develop tools which balanced the need for anonymity of patients and providers, while preserving uniqueness of patients. Read more about their work here
  • Eric Jones and Jamyia Clark of the Chicago Department of Public Health have been instrumental in shepherding the CDPH data into the Atlas— explaining the data, advising on presentation, and generally acting as an intermediary between the Web development and health informatics sides of the project. He also presents the project to the health science community at places like the 2013 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Annual Meeting

Read more about data sources on the Chicago Health Atlas About page.

On the Smart Chicago side, Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees all of our health initiatives and has been a great leader. Long-time consultant Derek Eder of Data Made has been essential to the success of this project. His deep experience with mapping Chicago things has been a huge natural resource. Aaron Salmon of Auraworks is the design lead for this project.

Patrice Coleman is our Project Coordinator in charge of outreach. Want to take part? Let’s do it.

Foodborne Chicago on WBEZ Chicago

Smart Chicago

Yesterday morning I talked with Tony Sarabia of the WBEZ Morning Shift about Foodborne Chicago. Here’s the sound. Listen all the way to the end for a pretty wacky bumper tune.

Key points covered:

  • This site is not about making a cool app. It’s about making teeny tiny connections between the people who matter: residents of the City of Chicago and the municipal government that serves them
  • Chicago’s Open 311 system (funded and supported by Smart Chicago) provides the technological and conceptual basis for this site. Without the ability to write directly to the City’s 311 system, and thereby get into the Chicago Department of Public Health’s normal workflow for dealing with food safety, Foodborne Chicago wouldn’t exist
  • Twitter and other social media is fast becoming important in all sorts of human domains, including health. There are one million health tweets per day and users tweet symptoms 4 days before seeing a doctor. See more here in this presentation out of Johns Hopkins University: Social Media: New Data Source for Public Health

Foodborne Chicago - Report incidents of food poisoning in Chicago

Behind the Scenes: Foodborne Chicago

Chris Gansen

Earlier this month the Smart Chicago Collaborative, in partnership with local developers Cory Nissen, Joe Olson, and Scott Robbin, and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), launched Foodborne Chicago, an innovative application that trawls Twitter for mentions of food poisoning in Chicago, enabling a team of administrators to connect with affected people and encourage them to report details of their food poisoning to the CDPH.

The Foodborne Chicago application is a collection of different services that make up a complex workflow. This post explains the overall architecture of the application and the direction that development is headed.

Backend analysis

Foodborne searches Twitter for all tweets near Chicago containing the string “food poisoning”. The ingestion service consumes thousands of tweets, storing them in a large MongoDB instance. A collection of classification servers, running R, churn through the collected tweets, applying a series of filters. The tweets are classified using a model that was trained via supervised learning, which determines if the tweets are related to a food poisoning illness or not. The Twitter crawler, classification machines, and MongoDB instance are all virtual EC2 instances running on the Smart Chicago Collaborative Amazon Web Services account.

Here is a sample of actual tweets and the determination of the classifier:

food poisoning tweets:

  • Knocked down by food poisoning for the second day. Not a good way to start the week 🙁
  • Stomach flu/food poisoning is like eating gas station sushi without the joys of eating gas station sushi
  • I think I ate my food too quick, either that or I sense food poisoning
  • Food poisoning at the first chapter meeting. Awesome..
  • My stomach keeps making the weirdest noise. Possibly food poisoning from Golden Nugget!

not food poisoning tweets:

  • I read that over six million people will get food poisoning this year with 100,000 requiring hospitalization. This is entirely preventable.
  • It’s really hard to snack while watching Honey Boo Boo. It’s the second best diet to food poisoning.

The Foodborne web application, a standard Ruby on Rails application, runs on Heroku, and has a scheduled job that loads classified tweets from the MongoDB instance every few minutes. This administrative interface shows the admin team, a partnership between Smart Chicago and the CDPH, a list of previously classified food poisoning tweets. For each tweet, the application shows if the tweet has been replied to, and if not, a simple mechanism for sending an @-reply to the tweet. The reply can use one of a standard set of replies, or a custom message, depending on context.

Public interaction

When users respond to the Twitter @-reply, they fill out a simple food poisoning report form on Foodborne. This form is submitted to the City of Chicago via its Open311 interface. This submission is equivalent to the person calling Chicago 311 to report their food poisoning. The 311 software routes the submission to the Chicago Department of Public Health, where investigators review the submission and take action, including conducting inspections, based on the report.

Development roadmap

Foodborne has a number of exciting development goals ahead. The backend infrastructure, while adequate, can be optimized and made far more efficient. Joe and Cory are exploring how to use EC2 spot instances and queuing tools to perform the classification work when computing resources are less expensive. The administrative interface will be extended to show more information about suspected food poisoning tweets, including if a person has submitted a request to 311. Scott and Cory are also working on building a feedback loop to the classifier; eventually administrators will be able to flag tweets that are incorrectly classified as relating to food poisoning illness and the classifier model will then learn to ignore similar tweets in the future.

Foodborne is an exciting addition to the collection of applications hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative. We’re proud of the work the entire Foodborne team has done, and look forward to supporting future development. If you’re a developer working with open data in Chicago, you may qualify for free hosting, too!