NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A Newport News high schooler is working to save you a trip to the doctor with his new app, "Skin in the Game."
Jamie Ashby, a freshman at Menchville High School, created the app to detect and identifies bug bites and skin conditions. The project began as a way to help him get into space camp.
Soon after he created it, it turned into something much bigger.
"He just kept entering it into contests and was successful about it," Ashby's aunt, Tecumpla Weefur, said.
Ashby coded and created the app himself by programming machine learning to detect skin conditions like bug bites, eczema and rashes.
"Train the pictures, so that each time you would train a picture it would run that data and then bring back anything that’s identical to what you took," he said.
Ashby said the idea was born out of frustration.
"My aunt..." he began.
"Not me!" Weefur interjected, laughing.
"Every time I would get a bug bite, she would say it was ringworm, so I made the app to prove her wrong," he said.
Ashby started asking his aunt for a Mac computer to code the program.
"I found a cheaper used one for him to work on and I said you know, 'You’re going to have to see this through, you’re going to have to finish this project' and he did, and we just entered it in every contest that would have him," she said.
Now, Ashby has reached the top 30 in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge: a national Society for Science STEM competition. He's in the running to win $25,000.
"You would take a picture, click use photo, and then it will bring up your photo and and it will bring up the name and the percentage on how accurate it is," Ashby said.
While it’s not available in the app store yet, he said that’s his next step. His aunt has been a willing test subject along the way, and said she couldn’t be more proud.
"I’m still shocked all of this happened really," Weefur said.
Ashby said they’ll know who won the contest in early November, but because of his placement in the top 30, Menchville High School will receive $1,000 to fund STEM activities.