Hi class,
I was reading an article that i found very interesting, because it points out that there are a lot more purposes for social media than I thought it had.
When you look at the title of this post you can imagine what the article was all about. So the article is about whether you can predict if you are going to be sick with the use of social media. The answer is, you can. With the use of Twitter you can predict if you’re going to be sick in the next week. This was the outcome of a study from the university of Rochester that analyzed 4.4 million GPS-tagged tweets from 600,000 users in New York City over the course of one month in 2010. The researchers used an algorithm to ignore tweets by healthy who claimed to be sick, for example of a popular song what had nothing to do with being really ill. The programmed the algorithm in a way that it was able with nearly 90% if people where ill and almost 8 days in advance. The algorithm analyses symptoms that certain illnesses have and determines if these people will be sick. Below is a video about the spread of flu in New York city second-by-second over one day that is monitored by the program. This gives a good example how you can monitor where these people are getting sick, and how it influences the other areas.
I found this really interesting because it really points out that you can predict if you are going to be sick or that an epidemic is coming in the coming weeks. This information can be used by the health sector to look whether people are going to be sick and if they need more medicine. I think that if there is a program what does this all the time and publishes its data continually, it can really help people to stay healthy and help doctors to better understand the situation. This study was done in New York City what is one of the biggest cities in the world. It is important to notice that deceases can spread more easily when there are a lot of people. It can be doubted whether this information from Twitter can work for smaller cities or villages, but that can be researched in the future. New York City does also have a lot op people that tweet and this is a reason why you can predict whether an epidemic is upcoming in Twitter in New York City. This could not be possible when there weren’t many people that were active on Twitter. So this method about whether people are going to be sick can be used in big cities where a lot of people use Twitter, but is not usable in big cities where Twitter is not actively used.
What do you think? Can this be a useful tool for the health sector or is this something that can only be used in big urban cities like New York?
Share your thoughts,
Tim Ellens
reference: http://wearesocialpeople.com/how-twitter-can-tell-you-when-you-are-going-to-get-sick, 2012
