Company wants to offer tool to help Olympic athletes stay healthy in Rio

There’s no vaccine readily available for the Zika virus, the mosquito-borne illness that has led golfer Rory McIlroy and other top golfers to skip the Summer Olympics in Rio.

San Francisco-based startup Kinsa, however, is offering up a device that can monitor one of the early symptoms of Zika: a fever. Kinsa founder and CEO Inder Singh said he wants to offer up the Smart Thermometer to U.S. athletes and their family and friends who will travel to Brazil this August where Zika is an epidemic.

“We want to provide a tool to give them a little more peace of mind just in case they begin feeling ill,” Singh said in a telephone interview. “The Kinsa Smart Thermometer doesn’t only take your temperature, but in a few simple taps, you can track your symptoms and take notes.”

The U.S. Olympic Committee says it has no affiliation with the company and has no plans to supply the product to its athletes.

The company’s device is the first smart phone app-enabled thermometer approved by the FDA and retails for $24.99. It connects to most current iPhone and Android devices through the headphone jack.

Fever pitch: A thermometer that's really smart

Singh said Kinsa’s “groups” feature could prove especially useful in Rio. Athletes and their entourage will have access to a the Kinsa Olympic Village Group and users can anonymously share symptoms and ailments. The "groups" feature was launched last year and is primarily used by parents to track the health at schools their children attend.

“It’s not just a thermometer, but you can track symptoms,” said Singh, a former executive vice president of the Clinton Foundation's Health Access Initiative. “With the U.S. Olympic team group, they’ll be able to see the health situation for other U.S. athletes.”

Since the 1988 Seoul Olympics, plenty of attention has been paid to the condoms handed out athletes in the Olympic Village. Three times more condoms will be distributed this summer — about 450,000 — than the 2012 Summer Games in London. Zika can be spread through sexual contact.

While researchers know how Zika is transmitted, Singh said there’s still plenty of unknowns. It was first discovered in 1947 in Uganda’s Zika Forest, initially detected in rhesus monkeys. The first human case was uncovered five years later, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“This is a tool that will help us more broadly understand Zika,” Singh said. “It will allow people to document when they come down with a fever and what the symptoms were. We are excited Kinsa can be used as a tool to actually better understand Zika in the long term. You have the be able to characterize the disease in order to help prevent and stop it”

Most people who contract Zika show no symptoms, which include a rash, fever and joint pain. The disease provides a high risk for pregnant women.  The virus can cause birth defects, including microcephaly, a condition in which leads to unusually small heads and an underdeveloped brain.