Mole Crowdsourcing to Detect Skin Cancer

Imagine this: during a skin self-exam you notice a growth or mole that looks suspicions but you aren’t sure. You take a picture of it with your phone using a special app that allows others to vote whether or not they think you should do something about it. The next day, you wake up and learn that 38 percent of the people that looked at it you should see a dermatologist. Sound crazy? Maybe, but it works. Jakob Jensen is a communication researcher at University of Utah who won a $2.2 million National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Grant to implement a system just like that. He talks about how he came up with the idea and why it works.