NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A Newport News high school student is working to save people from trips to the doctor with a new app called “Skin in the Game.”
Jamie Ashby, a freshman at Menchville High School, created an app to detect and identify insect bites and skin conditions. The project began as a way to allow him to attend space camp.
Shortly after he created it, it turned into something much bigger.
“He continued to enter contests and was successful,” said Ashby’s aunt, Tekampura Wiefer.
Ashby coded the app himself, programming machine learning to detect skin conditions such as insect bites, eczema and rashes.
“By training the photo, every time you train the photo it runs on that data and returns the same thing you captured,” he said.
Ashby said the idea was born out of frustration.
“Aunt…” he began.
“Not me!” Weefer interjected, laughing.
“Every time I get bitten by a bug, she says it’s ringworm, so I created the app to prove her wrong,” he said.
Ashby began asking his aunt for a Mac computer on which to code programs.
“I found a cheaper used item for him to work on, so I said, ‘You need to see this through, you need to finish this project,’ and he said yes “And we just got into it with every contest he enters in,” she said.
Currently, Ashby is in the top 30 in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, a national science association STEM competition. He is trying to win his $25,000.
“Take a photo,[写真を使用]If you click on it, it will show you the photo and show you the name and its accuracy percentage,” Ashby said.
It’s not yet available in the app store, but he said that’s the next step. His aunt has volunteered to be a test subject in the past, and she said she couldn’t be more proud.
“I’m still in shock that all this really happened,” Wiefer said.
Ashby said the winner of the contest will be known in early November, but for being in the top 30, Menchville High School will receive $1,000 in funding for STEM activities.