Find the tick before it finds skin.
TickBeep turns your phone into a tick detector. Sweep it down your trouser legs, your sleeves, your back and your gear. When something small is crawling, the phone beeps, buzzes, and boxes it on screen. Like a metal detector, but for ticks.
Join the field betaclosed beta for this season, no store link yet
Why your eyes are not enough
You did the walk. You brush yourself off at the car and you feel like you looked. Here is what a look misses.
The small ones are the problem
A grown tick you spot and flick off. A nymph is one to two millimetres, and on dark trousers your eye slides right past it. Those are the ones that ride home with you and attach for days before anyone notices.
You cannot see your own back
The back of your legs, your lower back, behind your collar, between the shoulder blades. You can twist and crane and still not see the places a tick actually climbs to. This is why people check each other. TickBeep is for the times you are on your own.
At home is already late
While you were walking, it was climbing. By the time you are on the couch it may be under a waistband or up a sleeve. The moment to check is at the trailhead, before you get in the car.
This is not about scaring you. It is about the fact that the small, quiet ones are the ones a person checking themselves will miss.
How it works
Three steps. Sweep, beep, look.
Sound instead of screen
When you run the phone down the back of your own leg, you cannot see the display at all. So TickBeep does not rely on it. It beeps and vibrates the instant it catches something. You keep sweeping and let your ears do the watching.
A green box when you do look
Anything the app catches gets a bright green box drawn on the live camera view. No squinting, no hunting the frame. The phone shows you exactly where.
It watches for movement, not shape
After a walk in the woods you are covered in specks: dirt, seeds, lint, pine needles. All of it sits still. A tick crawls. TickBeep looks for a small object of about the right size that is moving.
Two more things that help your own eyes: a colour-inversion mode, where a dark speck against a flipped background jumps out bright, and a raking-flashlight tip, where a real three-dimensional object throws a shadow and a stain does not. Everything runs on the phone. No camera frames leave your device.
Where it looks
You, what you wore, and what you carried.
Clothing
Trouser legs, sleeves, cuffs, collars, the seams they hide in. Sweep the fabric before it gets into the car with you.
Bare skin
Arms, neck, ankles, the back of the knee. The spots a tick heads for and the spots you cannot easily see.
Your gear
Backpack, boots, tent, sleeping mat. A tick rides home on the kit you carried, then finds you later. Check what you wore and what you packed, not just yourself.
What it does today, and what is in progress
We would rather be straight with you than oversell. Here is the honest split.
- Live detection of small moving objects on the camera view
- Bright green box around whatever it catches
- Beep and vibration so it works blind
- Colour-inversion mode
- Raking-flashlight guidance
- Runs fully on the phone, no frames uploaded
- Coverage mapping using the depth sensor, so the app knows which parts of you have been swept and which you skipped
- A mode tuned for animal fur, for later
- A thermal clip-on for warm-body detection
We are not putting dates on the in-progress list. It ships when it is good, not before.
Sign up for the beta
We are recruiting field testers for this season. A spot in the beta is free.
FAQ
Is this a medical device?
No. TickBeep is a detection aid that helps you spot a crawling tick sooner. It does not diagnose anything, it does not assess a bite, and it is not a substitute for medical advice.
What if the tick stops moving?
Then it may not catch it. TickBeep keys on movement, so a tick that goes still can slip past. Treat the app as a second set of eyes, not a replacement for a proper look-over. It finds things faster than you would alone. It does not promise to find every one.
Where do my camera frames go?
Nowhere. All the processing happens on your phone. No frames are uploaded, stored on a server, or sent anywhere.
Does it flag mosquitoes too?
Yes. It looks for anything small and moving, so mosquitoes, midges and ants will get boxed as well. Ticks are the target and the rest is a side effect of how it works. A box you can dismiss in a second beats a nymph you never saw.
What will it cost?
Free for this season's beta testers. That is the whole deal for signing up now.
Can it check a dog?
Not the focus. TickBeep is built for checking yourself and your clothes in the field. A mode tuned for animal fur is something we are looking at later, but the app is for you and what you wore, not the pet.
Android?
On the list. Tell us in the form which phone you carry and it helps us decide what to build next.