Kazemill—Japanese for “See the Cold”—is a system that converts Twitter noise into powerful, actionable public health information. And the Kazemill app brings the power of this system into the hands of people throughout Japan.

By capturing key words from Twitter, the Kazemill app actually forecasts the spread of cold symptoms, just like the news forecasts the weather. More than 1 million Tweets are posted about colds each month in Japan. This represents an enormous reservoir of real-time epidemiology for Kazemill.

In a country where public health consciousness is so high that people regularly wear surgical masks to protect themselves and others from airborne contagions, this is a tool with tremendous impact.

Kazemill captures and quantifies tweets related to specific cold symptoms, such as sore throat and fever, and charts these data onto a map of Japan. The key words were chosen carefully so as to decrease the potential for “disinformation.” Furthermore, the system uses a sophisticated algorithm developed in conjunction with Tokyo University to filter out non-cold-related tweets. “Dance fever” is not counted as a cold symptom.

Again in conjunction with Tokyo University, we analyzed the relationship between cold tweets and changes in the weather. As a result, Kazemill reports not only what symptoms are on the rise, but what the risk of catching a cold is day by day over the next weeks for any user at any location in Japan.

The Kazemill app has more than 40,000 downloads, adding to the over 100,000 unique users of the Kazemill website.

Sales of STAC, the client’s OTC cold remedy, stabilized after a long period of steady decline. For reasons of confidentiality, we have been asked not to share specifics.