While Fabrizio Dolfi was scrolling through news articles on his mobile phone, he happened to come across one that would soon inspire him to create a revolutionary and unique mobile phone application.

The app is called “My Sex Doctor” and is currently based in London. The goal of the app is to transform sexual education by giving its target audience of 13-25 year olds a new way to access reliable information about sex and sexuality; as well as to free them from the embarrassment of asking a medical professional or a relative about their sexual concerns.

“Puberty is a period of big transformation, not only physical but mental and emotional as well and young people are often left alone in this journey,” said Erika MacArthur, MYSD’s Social Media Manager. “It’s normal to have doubts and questions regarding what one is going through, but finding answers is not always easy; school programs can be inadequate, conversations with parents are embarrassing and an online search can take a long time and results cannot always be trusted.”

MYSD was created to effectively help young adults access the information they need to help them better understand what is happening to their bodies and to make more informed choices about their sex lives.

The app contains several categories. The first discusses the risks, symptoms and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. When a user of the app clicks on the category, they will read about why it is important that they know about sexually transmitted diseases, the symptoms associated with them and solutions such as getting tested or using any available means of protection.

“Many people with STDs notice a problem, but they are often embarrassed to go to the doctor,” said Dolfi, who lives in London. “So they often just wait and hope the problem will solve itself or will event try self medicating. Generally, things don’t get better by themselves but get worse and by the time they are forced to see a medical professional things are generally much more serious.”

MYSD gives users the general knowledge of what the STD is, the symptoms and what steps they should take if they feel like they could have one. The app also discusses sexual orientation, healthy relationships and what it means to be in an abusive relationship. The app is designed to allow users to choose the category they are most interested in and search for more information from there.

“Since the topic of sex can be uncomfortable for many to talk about, effective tools like apps that can reach lots of people are great!” said Sophia Carrillo, health educator at CSU East Bay. “There is so much misinformation out there regarding sexual health, it’s important for young people especially to have access to correct information that’s free of judgment and bias.”

Dolfi chose to use the mobile phone as a platform for the app to educate people about sexual education.

“As I was reading the article on my phone, I made the connection that everybody is carrying this powerful instrument with them every day, a number that is only going up, and therefore it seemed the ideal platform to gain young people’s attention,” he said.

To come up with the categories for the app, Dolfi created a list of 20 main sexual health topics that adolescents were concerned about. He completed this list with the help of a friend by approaching high school and college students and asking them for advice.

“We basically showed up at these schools and asked a group of people to write down the most pressing questions or doubts they had about sexuality, questions they would love to have an answer for,” Dolfi said.

After a few months this gave Dolfi more than 2,000 questions. He narrowed down the list to the most important ones, giving him a new total of 627. He then reached out to Ph.D. students in sexology and asked for their help to answer the questions. The process took about a year and a half.

During the time the Ph.D. students were researching, Dolfi was able to create the app interface and the Internet site. Once the content was finished it was ran through an editor that specializes in young adults to make sure the language was appropriate for its target audience.

“We didn’t want to make a list of ideas of the things that would happen to you if you had sex, because people most likely wouldn’t read that,” Dolfi said. “So what we do is give a brief description of the sex act itself and we mix it with the information of the potential risk that you’re getting exposed to.”

The app is available to download in two versions: A full version is available for users for 99 cents and a lite version available for free that contains 60-70 percent of the content. This allows users who are after reliable information on sexuality and sexual health to be able to obtain it for free and users who want more detailed information on sexual health to have it as well, but at a small price.

The app “My Sex Doctor” has recently launched a Facebook, Google+ page and a Twitter account updated with everything related to the app and sex education in general.

“Everything is still a bit experimental,” MacArthur said. “For the moment Facebook and Google+ are used to disseminate information about youth and sexuality while the two Twitter accounts are used more as communication tools.”

The app has uses hashtags that are typically followed by young people such as #College, #InHighSchool and #FreshmanAdvice.

According to MacArthur, the company has received mostly positive feedback, the majority of which has been received via email from sex educators.

“The other day one doctor here in the UK tweeted that for the first time he had prescribed a mobile app to a young patient and that app was MYSD,” she said. “That was a pretty cool moment.”

The business is only two months old and is currently operated by three people: Dolfi, who started the project, Mike Ross, who coordinates marketing efforts and MacArthur, who is responsible for their social media presence.

After the app has received enough feedback, Dolfi plans to translate the app into many different languages, beginning with Spanish.

“We don’t expect it to be perfect and we don’t expect it to be completed,” he said. “We try to cover as much as possible and use simple language to try to explain the content in a clear way and once we receive feedback we will expand and change it.”

MYSD has been shortlisted for the Smarta 100 awards, a contest every year that selects the most “disruptive and innovative” UK business.

The contest contains ten different categories and MYSD is currently placed second in the ‘Best Mobile Business’ category. They are also being invited to demonstrate their app on stage at the Health 2.0 Conference, which Dolfi describes as an honor for a two-month old start up business.

“We really think that MYSD can contribute to transform sex education, not just for the people that will download for the app but also for all young people by acting as a force of change in the field of sex education,” Dolfi said.