Social Media to Help Detect Disease Outbreak

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can be used for tracking outbreaks of diseases and other phenomena like rainfall. Researchers at Bristol University studied whether Twitter and Facebook can be harnessed to predict future events.

Research was conducted on Twitter using two case studies - rainfall and flu outbreak. Based on the state-of-the art technology researchers built a predictive model that was able to figure out key words in messages posted to the website Twitter associated with elevated levels of flu and estimate the severity of the disease in a specific area. Thus scientists can predict the outbreak of a particular disease in a particular area.

In another case study, researchers looked at levels of rainfall in a given location and time using the content of tweets.

These findings have been published online in the academic journal ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.

Source: Medindia