In a written statement, Himes said he was impressed with Kolb's work. Not only does he get ticks that Kolb can analyze using her app, but he's also the literal poster child for the application, as a photo of him in mid-air is used in promotional material for the online tool. Odie has been an instrumental part of the process. At the time, Kolb had already created the app, and the fellow dog-walker encouraged her to enter it into the competition. She encountered someone with the same type of dog and the two struck up a conversation about ticks. Kolb, 17, said she first heard about the congressional challenge when walking her dog, a Shih Tzu named Odie. The app has already racked up other awards, including a first place in the category of data science and bioinformatics in the Connecticut Science and Engineering Fair, the Lockheed Martin High School Innovator award for Kolb and the Yale Club of Hartford's Eli Whitney award. “I think it’s a very useful tool and I also think that just raising awareness about tick-borne diseases - I feel like we’re starting to now understand them,” Kolb said from inside Schulman's classroom at King. And based on the user's location, a tick risk is given allowing individuals to seek medical assistance if they are bitten. It took her about a year to complete the app, which uses data from the Tick Research Lab of Pennsylvania, as well as a "convolutional neural network" typically used in image processing and recognition that Kolb created.Īccording to her, the app can identify a variety of ticks with about 90 percent accuracy. I wanted to find a way to expedite the diagnosis and prognosis of tick-borne diseases since tick tests are expensive and take weeks to process, which is critical for time-sensitive diseases." "This inspired me to create a way to assess the risk posed by ticks and to raise awareness of tick-borne diseases. "I was shocked by the lack of awareness that some medical providers exhibited for tick-borne infections and ticks in general," Kolb said in a comment posted on the Congressional App Challenge website. In fact, she published it in May 2022 before the competition was even open, motivated by her troubling medical experience, she said. Members of Congress invited middle and high school students in their districts to apply and each participating representative chose a winning app from their area.īut Kolb didn't create the app with the Congressional App Challenge in mind. Kolb was one of 9,000 students cross the country who registered for the competition, an initiative of the U.S. Jim Himes, who selected it as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge for the district Himes represents, which extends from Greenwich to Bridgeport.
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