How an Ontario tech company is looking to track the spread of dangerous diseases
EpiSense is trying to be the weather app for diseases, founded by three people from Goderich, Ont.
The founders say they want to make it as easy as checking the weather to know what diseases are gaining momentum in your area.
'You might look at your phone to see, oh, there's going to be a storm today maybe I won't go for that hike, or I'm going to go to Ottawa or Toronto or Barrie, I want to know what the weather is to plan accordingly,' said Chapin Korosec, co-founder and lead of tech and data science.
'We want to make it easy to look at all the different disease trends are in your community and in any community that you might be travelling to.'
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Korosec has a PhD in biophysics and during the COVID-19 pandemic switched to mathematical immunology, working to understand bodies' response to vaccines and disease.
Along with fellow co-founders Alexandra Kasper and Michael Daley, the three are trying to help Ontarians, and eventually people across Canada, access accurate and easy-to-understand information about the spread of diseases at the touch of their fingers.
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EpiSense co-founders (left to right) Chapin Korosec, Alexandra Kasper, and Michael Daley in Goderich Ont. Supplied by Chapin Korosec
Kasper, the company's operations lead who has a background in theoretical physics, said they built the company with families in mind.
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'All three of our founder team are parents, so we really know how much getting sick throws your entire life off. It's anxiety-inducing and it's really exhausting and disruptive, especially when you have really little ones,' she said.
Kasper, who is also married to Korosec, said while it has been great to lean on his knowledge when making decisions related to their child, she knows not every parent has access to the same information.
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'I was talking to my friend recently who has a baby, and they were planning travel to go to this big family reunion, and they were really uncertain because their baby was too young to get their measles vaccine,' Kasper said.
She said Korosec was able to put together some information on the trends and data on the spread of measles for the area they were thinking of travelling to and the risks of getting sick, which helped their friends make an informed decision.
'We said, how do we get this at scale? How do we give that every parent and every Canadian can have access to that ready-to-go information to take something that's really overwhelming and turn it into something that you feel confident making the right choice for you,' Kasper said.
'We don't want to tell people what they need to do, but we want to have them be empowered to make those decisions for themselves in their own comfort levels.'
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EpiSense dashboard example for Goderich. Supplied by Chapin Korosec
EpiSense works by scouring the internet for all publicly-available data, and then the company verifies it and breaks it down into something easier to understand. It also lets users know where the information is coming from, so they can feel confident in the numbers they are seeing.
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They also plan to offer a self-reporting feature, which gives people the ability to privately provide information if they are not feeling well.
'It allows us to get ahead and get a lead time on what might be coming and being reported to public health and that lead time has value from our public health perspective. Because it allows resources to be allocated, if we can confirm that we are accurately forecasting, then that has value,' Korosec said.
To start off, the company plans to track measles, COVID-19, RSV, and rhinovirus, which is also known as the common cold.
They started with a web-based subscription platform costing $3.99 a month, with plans to expand to IOS and Android once they can test the platform.
'Diseases don't respect borders…. We're very proud to start in Ontario, we are very proud that this is a Canadian technology, but we envision a future where we are beyond Canadian borders,' Korosec said.
'We want to eliminate the sense of uncertainty where you just don't know, and so if you want to engage with your infant in society and you're uncertain and you are anxious, the idea is you can go to our app and it can inform you on how to more definitively make your decision.'
The company is launching their platform on July 2, 2025.
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