Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/70379
in North America Launched by the Wimpfheimer-Guggenheim Fund for International Exchange in Nutrition, Dietetics and Management, the "Lunch Break" poll and maps offer a fresh way to better understand lunchtime eating patterns in Canada and the United States (nutrition. esri.com/lunchbreak). Lunch Break demonstrates the use of Web polling via GIS to collect and map crowd- sourced (self-reported) information. The maps can be used to visualize trends and patterns in different geographic locations, and participants can interactively explore how their own eating habits compare with oth- ers in various locations (see Figure 1). Based on the PollMap template, the application is pow- Lunchtime Eating Patterns ered by Esri ArcGIS Server and uses the ArcGIS JavaScript application programming interface as the client. Figure 1. The "Lunch Break" application only collects data from the six questions on its opening Web page. Participants can report lunch data every day. Sickweather Crowdmaps Sickweather (www.sickweather.com/how) is an online social-health network that maps a range of crowd- sourced clinical symptoms and conditions in real time using its members' self-reported data (joining the network is free, as the service is supported by adver- tising) as well as data collated from social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Users can input "how they're feeling today" (choosing from a precompiled list of symptoms) and visualize on an interactive map which condition(s) currently are going around in various geographic locations, including their own postal code (see Figure 2). Figure 2. Sickweather promotes itself as the site "where one can check for the chance of sickness as easily as checking for the chance of rain." Two types of visualization can be seen: orange polygons and blue "sick" clouds (inset). The former represent a "storm," a concentrated amount of symptoms in a particular area, while the latter represent individual incidents or reports. JUNE 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 23