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SDI's Pollen.com Develops Allergy Alert App for Ford SYNC


pollen (select to view enlarged photo)

Relevant Connections: Ford Buyer's Guide

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA—May 18, 2011: Pollen.com, the most visited allergy site on the Web, demonstrated today at Ford’s Media Forum: Health & Wellness Connectivity its iPhone Allergy Alert app for Ford’s dashboard SYNC in-car connectivity system, which is aimed at reducing driver distraction. After surveying healthcare apps that were in demand, Ford sought out SDI, the company behind Pollen.com, as a potential partner for its initiative to help drivers proactively manage their, and passengers’, wellness while on the go.

“We are happy to support Ford’s initiative of connecting drivers with resources and services important to their health and wellness”

Pollen.com developers enabled the Allergy Alert app for the iPhone to communicate via Ford’s SYNC using AppLink technology, giving users voice-controlled access to location-based forecasts for four different conditions: allergy (pollen), asthma, cold and cough, and ultraviolet sensitivity.

Features of the Allergy Alert iPhone SYNC application include:

  • One-day alerts and four-day forecasts for four different conditions: allergy (pollen), asthma, cold and cough, and ultraviolet sensitivity --automatically customized to location
  • Indexes from 0.0 to 12.0 indicating the range of people likely to be affected by each condition
  • Easy-to-read user interface
  • Data converted to audio output

“We are happy to support Ford’s initiative of connecting drivers with resources and services important to their health and wellness,”said Jody Fisher, SDI Vice President of Marketing. “Our developers initially created the iPhone app to provide users with greater access to the information they’ve come to rely on from Pollen.com. Having instant, portable access for their conditions helps users plan their day or week ahead so they can remain active, which ultimately improves their quality of life. Collaborating with Ford is the perfect extension of this objective."

Pollen.com’s Allergy Alert app for the iPhone, which was launched in the second quarter of 2009, had over 1 million users in 2010 with more than 80,000 downloads, putting it in the Top 100 healthcare apps on iTunes. SDI expects the Allergy Alert SYNC app to be production-ready in the third quarter of 2011.

SDI developed Pollen.com’s proprietary forecasts and also manufactures Rotorod®, the leading tool for pollen count measurement. For more than 10 years, SDI has helped to set the standards by which scientists, researchers, and doctors operate their samplers, and by which they analyze their pollen samples to obtain accurate and consistent counts.

About Pollen

www.Pollen.com, a division of SDI, has been supplying important information to millions of people with allergic conditions for more than 10 years. With reliable, up-to-the-minute allergy forecasts that show upcoming local airborne allergen conditions, along with the weather forecast, Pollen.com prepares allergy sufferers for the day by offering all the facts --at a glance. Among its free services, Pollen.com offers charts of current and predicted pollen levels, pollen histories, e-mail alerts, and educational materials on how to manage seasonal allergies. Pollen.com has the Health On the Net s Code of Conduct certification (HONcode©), identifying it as an internationally reliable source of health information.