(Please note that this application was developed by an academic team under the leadership of Dr. Kelly Caine and Dr. Sameer Patil, at Indiana University Bloomington. Team members include: Michele Degges, Mukta Gundi, Pranav Gupta, Matthew Holfelner, and Anthony Monaco.)

One very important health decision that faces college students, among many other groups, is the decision of where to move upon graduation or job change. The difficulty involved in this decision making process motivated us to design HealthyState, an app that uses data from the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) to provide visualizations and summary data about the overall health of the existing population of US states. The app can help people make informed decisions about where they move. Because overall population health varies state by state, but these variations are not usually considered during the decision to move process, we decided to make use of the enormous federal data available to build an easy-to-use interactive visualization. We want to help people make informed choices about bettering their overall living conditions. Our goal is for people to take into account health as one of the factors they consider in making decisions about relocating to a different state.

The goal of the HealthyState app is to help people gain awareness of the health conditions prevalent in US states. We were specifically interested in making this app available to young adults (e.g., college students looking for their first job), who are planning to move to another state to pursue higher education, for a job, or for a variety of other reasons. We have focused on building an app that provides easy-to-consume information about health conditions such as: stroke, obesity, diabetes, cardiac disease, binge drinking, smoking, HIV, AIDS, and lung disease.