Thread: Fighting Steroids in Sports with the iPhone

Fighting Steroids in Sports with the iPhone
By Millard Baker

Several international and national anti-doping agencies have introduced mobile-friendly applications to help athletes comply with the strict anti-doping rules against anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. The national anti-doping organizations in Ireland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, United States, Germany and South Africa have all announced either mobile versions of their website and/or iPhone apps.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released the very first anti-doping iPhone application in December 2010. The application was a little disappointing since it was simply a mobile-friendly version of the “List of Prohibited Substances and Methods” that appears on the orgnization’s website.

Ireland became the first country to improve upon WADA’s basic idea of converting the Prohibited List into an iPhone application. The Irish Sports Council, which oversees the Irish Anti-Doping Programme, introduced the “Medication Checker” iPhone app in April 2011. The “Medication Checker” cross-references the WADA Prohibited Substances list with prescription and non-prescription medications currently marketed in Ireland. This was accomplished with the use of the Eirpharm Medicines in Sport database.

Antidoping Switzerland introduced the “Antidoping Switzerland” iPhone app in July 2011. It crosses references prohibited drugs with medications that are registered in Switzerland. Users can search for banned drugs by brand name or by drug name and obtain all available concentrations of the prohibited medication.

The South African Institute for Drug-Free Sports has a similar iPhone app that lists banned drugs according to the brand names used in South Africa. It lists over 3,260 medications allowing users to search by whether it is prohibited in-competition only, at all times, in certain sports or in males only. The app was introduced in August 2011 along with a mobile-friendly version of their website.

The German National Anti-Doping Agency does not have an iPhone app but they have made their website’s drug database accessible to mobile users with a mobile-friendly template.

Still, most of the applications are little more than drug databases lacking anything truly innovative.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency has a mobile-friendly version of their website that allows users to check-in to update their whereabouts information.

However, the coolest and most useful application by far is the Dutch Anti-Doping Agency’s “Whereabouts App” for iPhone which utilizes the mobile phones internal GPS system to allow athletes to effortlessly synchronize and update their whereabouts information with the DADA’s website whenever they are on the road.

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I already get enough spam on my iPhone I do not need more