Stats Apps

I was reading recently about projects which "gamify" your PhD. That means they take a PhD topic and make it into a computer game. The idea is this is a way to engage with the public, part of science communication. The FameLab and I'm a Scientistic Get Me Out Of Here scheme are other ways to get people interested by pitching PhDs in fun and simple terms.
In a similar vein to making computer games out of PhD projects I thought I'd see what apps there are out there around statistics. I have an Android phone so looked on the Google Play site. What I found was rather a lot, more than I expected at least. Generally they are simple tools for recording and dispaying simple summaries and graphs of small data samples. The user enters in the data by hand and then can choose things like descriptive statistics or histograms and regressions.
The other sort of app is the explanation tool. This is really a condensed version of Wikipedia.

I thought I'd try and come-up with some of my own ideas for stats apps:

• something to do with public health/cardiovascular disease/lifestyle risk factors. Maybe a calculator that takes how much excercies, diet and weight and gives the risks of things

• something that uses census data and makes it specific to you (where you live, age groups,...)

 [UPDATE 5/1/13 just found this which looks like a slick Beta version of what I had in mind!]

• something like a rumour/infection app. you can only get it by blue-tooth with another mobile (after the intial population has been set-up). so the idea is to gather data as part of an experiment to see how people interact and the spread of a "rumour"

• then it returns interesting statistics to the mobile app like what number in the chain you are, how long after initial infection (speed), network diagrams of infected with phone names labels (degrees of separation)
• the infection rate and recovery rate could be effected by imposing a time limit on how long the phone is infectious (can transmit app), prizes and incentives to passing on the app (e.g. every 100 people theres a prize draw for an iPad)...
• practically, there could be 2 big buttons on the phones home screen: one if the infected person tries to pass it on i.e. mentions it their friend and another to send it
•  in a time of bird flu, swine flu, etc this could be useful information about how people interact. it could also show how word-of-mouth or gossip works- often considered the best form of advertising.