The Bed Bug App

Perhaps more practical than the great white shark tracking app I downloaded a few years ago comes a new app that can identify bed bugs and offer suggestions for ridding them from your home in the event of an infestation.

Instead of immediately vacating your home once you have spotted the relentless critter, or setting fire to all your earthly possessions, a consult of sorts is now available at your fingertips: Thanks to a researcher from Ohio State University, a bed bug app is now available, informing bed bug novices about everything they need to know from identifying the nuisance bugs to preventing them from coming home with you after vacation.

Calling the app necessary amid a resurgence in bed bug infestations, Ohio State Entomologist Susan Jones developed the app to help people spot and thus get rid of the bugs.

"If you don't know anything about an organism, then you are sort of at the mercy of that creature," said Jones, who has been studying bed bugs for roughly 10 years.

Likely to ignite extreme panic, bed bugs, once identified, require a specific set of steps to eradicate according to Jones who recommends in most instances that a professional be sought, as most over-the-counter chemicals likely won’t take care of the problem. In extreme cases, people attempting to treat the problem on their own have inadvertently started fires, destroying all of their possessions and, in one instance, an entire structure.

The reason that the bugs tend to come back after such treatments is that they tend to rapidly reproduce, concealing themselves everywhere from floor to ceiling and moving around at night, generally when residents are sleeping.

Explaining that once the app has helped to identify the bugs, Jones believes that those suffering from infestation can appropriately combat the problem instead of relying on ineffective methods.

The app can be found by simply searching the unsettling combination of words “bed bug field guide.”