Andrés Colubri, MFA, PhD, shows off the Travel Healthy app.
Andrés Colubri, MFA, PhD, assistant professor of genomics & computational biology at UMass Chan Medical School, has collaborated with a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) on a mobile app that enables infectious disease research and helps to keep international travelers healthy.
Dr. Colubri and his multidisciplinary lab of computational scientists, software engineers and visual designers developed and implemented the Travel Healthy App for the Global Travelers’ Epidemiology Network, a nationwide consortium of travel clinics focused on research and disease prevention that is supported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention and coordinated by MGH. The co-directors are Regina LaRocque, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and faculty member of MGH’s Division of Infectious Diseases, and Edward Ryan, MD, director of global infectious diseases at MGH, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The Travel Healthy app was nominated for a 2024 UX Design Award.
“We started this project from the ground up, meaning we created the technology itself,” said Colubri, who specializes in the integration of machine learning, digital epidemiology, genomics, data visualization and mobile technologies to create tools for infectious disease research. “Mobile devices open up a lot of opportunities to collect health data that would be very hard to obtain otherwise.”
Prior to the app’s soft launch last year, MGH would collect information before and after an international trip, but not during.
“The time of the travel was kind of a black box,” Colubri said.
The Travel Healthy app includes a daily symptom survey, which begins a day before departure and concludes three days after a traveler’s return; medication reminders for antimalaria medications such as Malarone or Chloroquine; and CDC health notices. The notices are sent based on phone location data, but all the data in the app is encrypted; it can’t be used by researchers unless the user has signed up to participate in a paid research study via the project website. In that case, the data goes to a database compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Otherwise, the free app is available to anyone who downloads it from the App Store or Google Play.
“Mobile devices open up a lot of opportunities to collect health data that would be very hard to obtain otherwise.”
“I’m hoping that as we scale this, we might have a volume of users that will allow us to start to see statistically significant trends about endemic pathogens worldwide and perhaps even identify emerging outbreaks,” Colubri said.
A research paper is in the works, as well as an expansion to enable sample collections that would inform researchers if travelers were acquiring antibiotic-resistant microbes while on a trip, and if so, what specific species of microbes. For that, Colubri is partnering with Vanni Bucci, PhD, associate professor of microbiology, and Beth McCormick, PhD, the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Chair II, chair and professor of microbiology and director of the Center for Microbiome Research and the Program in Microbiome Dynamics.
In July, Colubri and a designer from his lab, Yinan Dong, MFA, were nominated in the international UX Design Awards competition for the Travel Healthy project. Winners of the UX Design Awards will be announced on Sept. 3.
Colubri joined the UMass Chan faculty in August 2020. He has a PhD in mathematics from Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina, where he is from, and an MFA in media arts from the University of California, Los Angeles.
