PoopMD App, take the photo of your baby’s poop and have it analyzed

One of the biggest worries that the new parents might have is the color of their baby's poop, especially if the baby is breastfed and they have to change diapers too often. The reason for this worry is a wide range of colors the baby poop comes in, such as all shades of yellow, brown, green, etc. While some of these colors may look abnormal for adults, most baby stool colors are in fact perfectly normal and shouldn't be a cause for concern.

However, some baby's poop color may also indicate that your baby has certain health issues, such as gastrointestinal problems or a problem with the liver, especially if the stool is pale, which could be a sign of a rare liver disease.
Before you run to your pediatrician, there's the simple rule to remember about baby poop. Most colors are normal except for red, black or white.

While red or black poop may suggest gastrointestinal bleeding, certain food or supplements may color the poop red or black. Also, newborn babies will produce greenish-black poop in the first few days of their life, which is perfectly normal.

White or pale poop, on the other hand, may suggest more serious condition with baby's liver, most commonly biliary atresia, which is a blockage or absence of bile ducts in newborn infants, preventing bile from getting out the liver. The condition is rare, but it's also very serious, so an early detection can greatly improve the outcome.

That's why it's very important to see your pediatrician right away if your baby's poop is red, black or white. Taking a full diaper with you, of course, isn't an option, but taking a photo of your baby's poop might be a good idea. Even better solution would be showing that photo to your pediatrician, using a mobile app.

Johns Hopkins developed that kind of app called PoopMD that allows parents to take the photo of their baby's stool in order to get the right diagnose and advice from their pediatrician.

The PoopMD app evaluates the newborn's poop color, with the help of your smartphone camera paired with the color recognition software integrated within the app. The PoopMD app only evaluates the stool color for babies under 6 months of age. It doesn't work on older babies.

The app's home screen opens to Color Analyzer, allowing parents to choose one of the three options, i.e. to take a new photo, to choose previously taken photo from the phone gallery, or to read photo tips. First two options are straightforward. First uses your phone camera functionality, while the other allows you to browse your phone or internal card for existing poop photos.

After taking a photo, or choosing a photo from the phone, you'll be asked to tap on image to enable the color picker functionality. Basically, it allows you to drag the circle with pointer around the photo, until you pick the color you want to be analyzed. After picking color, you will get the results with the brief explanation and suggestions, which will be either normal color, or one of the results that require the visit to your pediatrician, i.e. red, black or white stool color.

Also, you might be prompted to retry the pick, if the color is unusual or goes beyond the palette provided in app. This happens mostly because of bad lighting conditions or other factors that could alter the color in the photo.

This is why PoopMD provides some photo tips, which help you take as best photo as possible. These photo tips suggest you to take photos using only natural light from a window, because artificial light or sunlight may alter the color, i.e. traditional lightbulbs cast a yellow tone, fluorescent bulbs cast green tone, while sunlight create glare and washed out color. The app also suggests users not including diapers in photo, but only poop for better results.

Once the analysis is done, the users can save it to their baby's profile, with baby name, DoB, doctor's email address and optionally baby's photo. You can opt-in to receive reminders every other week to check your baby's poop. Of course, creating baby's profile is completely optional, but it could be very useful in tracking and analyzing the poop on a long term (for example how it behaves after certain foods, after fever or cramps, etc.)

The app also offers Poop Info page with two sections where users can check detailed information about baby's poop, including very useful baby poop color chart.

Finally, About section offers more information about the app developers and their partners who made the development of this app possible.

The PoopMD app is currently available for both Android and iOS apps. While it's free on Android devices, if you want to use it on your iPhone, you have to pay $0.99. Or you can use a free version of this app called PoopMD+, made by Johns Hopkins along with Beneufit, which is basically a research that requires users to participate in a survey two weeks after the first poop evaluation, and which unfortunately isn't available in all countries. Paid iPhone version of the app doesn't require taking a survey and it's available worldwide.

This app impressed us in overall. It has simple and sleek design with straightforward functionalities. Taking the photos and uploading them to the app works without delay. Also, the analysis is done in a second. The thing we didn't like, besides the pricing inequalities, is the lack of sharing option. Ability to send a photo to your pediatrician would speed up and improve care.

The app is primarily made for parents worried about their babies' stool color, but the providers can use it as well. It should be noted however, that despite its impressive feature for stool analysis and detailed information it provides, the PoopMD should be used only as an educational guide, not a diagnostic tool the parent should rely on completely. The baby's poop color depends on many factors, so your pediatrician should be the one who will give you the right advice regarding your baby's health.

Benefit: The parents who want to better understand what the color of their baby’s poop means. Pediatricians who want to provide parents with more information about their baby's poop color.