The iPhone application looks up WADA's banned substance list and compares various products against it. (Image credit: Daniel Simms)
Is your choice of breakfast cereal going to cause a positive doping test? Mechanical design engineer James Mattis knows that this question isn’t silly to an elite level cyclist. He has developed a free iPhone application called DrugSearch 1.3, which offers easy access to the World Anti-Doping Authority’s banned substance list via an iPhone.
DrugSearch 1.3 is an advertising supported application that allows users to quickly browse or search the WADA’s list to ensure that the foods, vitamins, supplements and medications that they are taking are legal. This is a surprisingly complicated field to navigate when things that seem harmless, like breakfast cereal, contain banned substances like THC, which could result in a positive test.
The athlete testing topic hits close to home for Mattis. He moonlights as a member of the California Giant-Specialized cycling team and is married to Webcor Builders' Katheryn Curi-Mattis, who is part of the US Anti-Doping Agency’s out of competition testing program. In 2008, James won the US elite national championship road race and was subsequently tested. He sees DrugSearch as a service to his peers.
“My wife is part of the random drug testing pool,” Mattis told Cyclingnews. “And I was just something I thought could make all athletes lives better after watching what my wife has to go through.”
This is the third iPhone application Mattis has developed and it took three weeks to create. His first took four months.
“This one didn’t take too long,” says Mattis, “because I had learned how to do the programming with the other apps.”
DrugSearch can be downloaded for free from Apple’s iTunes store and works with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, when it comes out.
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