Law enforcement officials say Toledo has one of the highest rates of human trafficking in the nation. Now, you can help fight this epidemic with your phone.

“I was excited I can do something to help- and it’s simple! The app is super simple to use,” Tallie Kissinger said. She lives just outside of Toledo and works as a flight attendant.

“I honestly have felt at a loss over the past few years as there’s been more attention brought to the subject of human trafficking in our area.”

She felt helpless until she heard about “the TraffickCam app.” You use it to upload pictures of your hotel room, so law enforcement can use those pictures to help find human trafficking victims. An officer can take a suspicious picture of a child in a hotel room off the internet, blur the face, and upload the photo to the department’s secure portal of the app.

“The algorithm is run within the national database-pictures are returned to the officer with the most probable location based on the number of match points it has,” Molly Hackett, a founder of the app said.

The technology is similar to facial recognition software, but much more complicated-with millions of data points. It has an 85% location accuracy rate.

“So there’s a lot of excitement about the potential that this has in terms of speeding up rescues and it needs to be proven. And I think that’s part of it,” Hackett said.

The more photos collected through the app, the better it will work. Even while in its test phase, more than one and a half million photos have been uploaded.

“I hope it catches on. Like I said, it’s very easy to use. You just open up the app, you have to enable your location, you type in what hotel you’re in, the name of the room, and then it gives options for contributing 4 pictures of the room and that’s that. It’s very easy,” Kissenger said

“Certainly anything that we can do as a society to help combat this problem of human trafficking, I think is worthwhile,” Lt. Joe Heffernan, of the Toledo Police Department said. “If this is something that will work, I haven’t really heard about it before or done the research with it, but if it is something that will work, then why not try it?”

NBC 24 ©August 2016