New Canaan teen invents an app to identify ticks
STAMFORD — Antonia Kolb’s app is full of bugs, but that’s by design.
The junior at Stamford’s King School created an online application that allows users to scan and identify ticks and to learn about the risks associated with them.
Kolb, who lives in a wooded section of New Canaan, has had a long and close history with ticks. Growing up, she was told to check often for the blood-ingesting parasites, and she developed a serious fear of them.
Then, a few years ago, Kolb began experiencing worrisome symptoms including fainting and dizziness. King teacher Victoria Schulman said Kolb fainted a few times in her class, and her symptoms sent her to the hospital on numerous occasions, disrupting her studies and classroom experience.
After a year of misdiagnoses, Kolb said, she was eventually diagnosed with Babesia and Bartonella, two rare and potentially life-threatening tick-borne illnesses.
That delay in finding the cause of her symptoms motivated Kolb to create an app to raise awareness of the risks involved with ticks, and to better identify different species of the parasites. She called it Detickt It.
The app caught the eye of U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, who selected it as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge for the district Himes represents, which extends from Greenwich to Bridgeport. Kolb was one of 9,000 students cross the country who registered for the competition, an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives. Members of Congress invited middle and high school students in
their districts to apply and each participating representative chose a winning app from their area.
But Kolb didn’t create the app with the Congressional App Challenge in mind. In fact, she published it in May 2022 before the competition was even open, motivated by her troubling medical experience, she said.
“I was shocked by the lack of awareness that some medical providers exhibited for tickborne infections and ticks in general,” Kolb said in a comment posted on the Congressional
App Challenge website. “This inspired me to create a way to assess the risk posed by ticks and to raise awareness of tick-borne diseases. I wanted to find a way to expedite the diagnosis and prognosis of tickborne diseases since tick tests are expensive and take weeks to process, which is critical for time-sensitive diseases.”
It took her about a year to complete the app, which uses data from the Tick Research Lab of Pennsylvania, as well as a “convolutional neural network” typically used in image processing
and recognition that Kolb created.
According to her, the app can identify a variety of ticks with about 90 percent accuracy. And based on the user’s location, a tick risk is given allowing individuals to seek medical assistance if they are bitten.
“I think it’s a very useful tool and I also think that just raising awareness about tick-borne diseases — I feel like we’re starting to now understand them,” Kolb said from inside Schulman’s classroom at King.
The app has already racked up other awards, including a first place in the category of data science and bioinformatics in the Connecticut Science and Engineering Fair, the Lockheed Martin High School Innovator award for Kolb and the Yale Club of Hartford’s Eli Whitney award.
Kolb, 17, said she first heard about the congressional challenge when walking her dog, a Shih Tzu named Odie. She encountered someone with the same type of dog and the two struck up a conversation about ticks. At the time, Kolb had already created the app, and the fellow dog-walker encouraged her to enter it into the competition.
Odie has been an instrumental part of the process. Not only does he get ticks that Kolb can analyze using her app, but he’s also the literal poster child for the application, as a photo of him in mid-air is used in promotional material for the online tool.
In a written statement, Himes said he was impressed with Kolb’s work.
“Among many strong submissions, Detickt It stood out, offering a critical tool to more effectively detect, diagnose and treat tick-related illnesses,” he wrote.
Winners of the challenge, including Kolb, are invited to Washington, D.C., to demo their apps to representatives during the annual #HouseOfCode festival, which will be held in April.
“I think it’s an honor to have this congressional award because I started this project not really knowing where it would go,” Kolb said. “And just to have recognition on this level — and now I get to go to Washington and also present my app — I just think it’s a very amazing opportunity.”