iPhone, please take my temperature (with @kinsahealth)

Here's a dongle for your smartphone that could actually save your life.

Health care startup Kinsa is readying what it calls "the world's smartest thermometer" — a small, flexible thermometer that plugs into an iPhone or Android smartphone. It not only gives you a fun and graphical depiction of your body heat, but also aggregates data to show the "health" of a community, what Kinsa calls the "health weather."

Inder Singh, Kinsa's founder, was previously an executive VP of the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s program to fight Malaria and HIV in Africa and South Asia. “While I was there," Singh told Fast Company, "it struck me that if we just knew a little more about how the illness was spreading, we could do more."

The result: The Kinsa thermometer.

At the NY Tech Meetup on October 8, 2013, Singh said:

"We are creating a product that we believe will truly transform the way people care for their families. And we are creating a system where data, crowdsourced data — your data — will save lives." 

Kinsa is one of a number of devices and companies working to harness health data to help educate and prevent the spread of disease.