Tarun Katapally wants to help ensure everyone, everywhere has access to health care and health information. 

A key part of his approach is harnessing data shared by individuals to build a more effective health system. Katapally, who is an MD and epidemiologist, believes health is about many things, from finding a health-care practitioner to following healthy lifestyles to being prepared for natural disasters.  

With all of these angles (and many more) in mind, Katapally has one overriding priority – that health expertise has to be accessible no matter where you live or your financial status.  

That’s where smartphones come in.  

“They're a one-stop-shop for a lot of the things we do,” says Katapally,  a professor at Western’s School of Health Studies and Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Digital Health for Equity.

“Real-time access to health care is possible through any of the digital devices that we might have. It could be a smartphone, laptop, desktop or a smartwatch.”

Katapally and his team of student researchers are at the experimental stage now, developing and testing various digital applications through the Digital Epidemiology and Population Health Laboratory (DEPtH) at Western.  

A key for Katapally is not treating people as patients. He prefers to call them “citizen scientists,” using their information and experiences to build a better health-care system.

“No one likes to be a patient. If I call my patient a citizen scientist, I'm going to get better data and they will feel more engaged in their health.”

Here’s an example: In 2020, the DEPtH lab worked with citizens in Ille-a-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan to develop Co-Away, a mobile app designed to help monitor and better manage the spread of COVID-19 in Indigenous and remote communities.

With a vision for health equity and collaboration with citizen scientists, Katapally and his team are now embarking on a series of next steps – one of which, exploring the health effects of climate change, holds the potential to make a profound impact.

“Climate change has obvious implications for human health. We could use mobile technology to obtain data from citizens to predict risks of climate change, such as flooding, and use it to reach out to people before a disaster happens and manage disasters as they are happening.”