Feb. 24--A Chicago-area woman has settled a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission over a smartphone application she developed to detect whether a mole is likely to be cancerous.
The FTC said Monday that the Mole Detective app's claims that it could accurately analyze melanoma risk were deceptive and lacked any reliable scientific evidence as support.
The agency barred Kristi Zuhlke Kimball and her company, New Consumer Solutions, from making any misleading health claims about a product or service and required them to give up $3,930 in profits.
Kimball could not immediately be reached for comment.
With Mole Detective, consumers used their smartphones to take pictures of skin lesions. The app then purportedly used algorithms to determine the lesion's cancer risk as low, medium or high, the FTC said. The app sold for as much as $4.99.
The FTC's complaint comes two years after a study found that skin cancer-detecting apps were not very accurate. One of the algorithm-based apps missed 18 of 60 melanomas, and it was the most accurate of three tested.
Skin cancer-detecting apps are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The website for the Mole Detective app cautioned customers to, "Always defer to a medical professional if you feel that a mole looks suspicious. Mole Detective's intent is not to (diagnose) but to help you better track the symptoms of melanoma at home."
According to the suit, U.S. sales of the Mole Detective app from January 2012 to December 2013 totaled more than $50,000.
Another defendant in the suit, Avrom Lasarow, has not settled the allegations against him, the FTC said. In 2012, Kimball sold the rights to Mole Detective to Lasarow's company, the complaint said, but she continued to appear in advertising for the app.
The agency said it also settled a suit brought against a second skin cancer-detecting app called MelApp.
asachdev@tribpub.com
