Ultimately, she wasn't able to find a correlation. But maybe some else will find gold in this data. Instead of keeping it to herself, Stanton streamed the data to a public online service she helped create called OpenSensors.io, and from there, it can be accessed and analyzed by public health researchers, journalists, and other concerned citizens—or even feed into online applications that can make use of it.

OpenSensors is a service where anyone can publish real-time sensor data. Think of it as Twitter for sensors. You can publish a stream of data from virtually any source to the company's computer servers—or subscribe to streams of data coming from others, using it for your own research, gadget, or online app.

You can publish private feeds of data as well, but the company's larger goal is to cultivate of a huge repository of open information. "We believe that public data should be shared," Stanton says, "especially public data that has been paid for by governments and applies to many people. So what we want to do is give the use of data."