Twitter Tracks Disease Outbreaks

From E-learn Portal
Jump to: navigation, search

New research from Brigham Young University says such posts on Twitter could be beneficial to health officials looking for a head start on outbreaks. just another wordpress site



The study analyzed 24 million tweets from 10,000,000 unique users. The study found that only 15% of tweets contain precise location data. This data was taken from user profiles and tweets containing GPS information. This could be a critical mass for an early warning system that can monitor terms such as "fever", "flu", and "coughing."



Professor Christophe Giraud Carrier, BYU, stated that one of the things this study illustrates is that the distributions of tweets are about the same as the distributions of the general population. This allows us to have an accurate representation of the nation. "That's another nice validity point especially if you're going to study issues like spreading diseases."



Professor Giraud-Carrier (@ChristopheGC), and his students in computer science from BYU share their findings in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.



Researchers have discovered that Twitter's location-tagging feature, which allows tweets to be tagged with a specific location was not as useful as they expected. They found that only 2 percent of tweets had the GPS info. That's a much lower rate than the percentage Twitter users are reporting in surveys.



"There is this gap that is well-known between what you think you're doing and what you are actually doing," Giraud-Carrier said.



User profiles are often used to discover and interpret location information. Some people make use of the location field to make a joke. "Somewhere in my imagination" or "a cube world in Minecraft." However, the researchers confirmed that this user-supplied data was accurate 88 percent of the time. In addition to the jokes, some of the errors are due to people tweeting while they travel.



Health officials from public health could collect state-level information , or even better, for 15% of tweets. This is a good sign for the viability and feasibility of a Twitter-based system of monitoring health issues to supplement the confirmed data from sentinel hospitals.



Scott Burton, a graduate student who was the primary researcher in the study, said that "the first step is to look up symptoms that are tied to location indicators" and then plot them on a map. "You can also check to see if anyone is discussing actual diagnosis or self-reported symptoms such as "The doctor told me I'm suffering from the flu.'



The computer scientists worked with two BYU health science professors for the project. Professor Josh West claims that Twitter's principal benefit for health officials is speed.



"If people in a certain region have similar symptoms, and they are reported on Twitter health officials may put out a warning to health professionals to prepare for something," West said. "Under circumstances like that, it can be extremely useful."



Kesler Tanner, a BYU student, is the coauthor of the study. Tanner is the one who wrote the code that allowed him to access the data through Twitter. just another wordpress site He is graduating in April and will be heading off to graduate school to pursue the pursuit of a Ph.D.