NEWS COPY – WITH PICTURES – by Ben Cusack and Jessica Howard
A university student is flushed with success after creating the world’s first mobile mapping app – that points out PUBLIC TOILETS.
Fourth year Computer Science student Jake Ruston built the unique loo-tracking app to help people caught short find the closest public convenience.
Jake, who studies at the University of East Anglia, came up with the idea after receiving sarcastic feedback from a tester of a previous London Underground app who said a toilet map would have been more useful.
Speaking to student newspaper The Tab, Jake said: “A lot of people were asking me to include details of toilet facilities for London, but I decided to go bigger and design something for the whole world.
“I asked my family and friends about whether they thought it would be useful and they all thought it was a great idea. I think it will be really useful for almost everyone.
“I told my lecturer about it, who forwarded it onto the press office.
“It was picked up on a tech website and it expanded from there.”
Jake, 21, who lives in Norwich, hopes the app will help people with conditions such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Crohn’s, as well as helping lost tourists.
He added: “There have been times when I’ve been in other countries such as Germany and I’ve needed to find a toilet, which has been difficult to locate due to obvious language barriers and unfamiliarity with the area.”
The app uses your phone’s GPS to find free nearby toilets, including those with disabled access, and already been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
Flush Toilet Finder also allows users to add new locations, which means there are already in excess of 100,000 public conveniences in the database.
It can be downloaded from the app store on Android and iOS devices.
ENDS
