I read an article that says that Twitter can be used to track Disease Outbreaks. While not a lot of useful information for such a thing comes out of twitter, everybody on twitter like to complain that they are sick or can't go into work etc. and some people even have GPS locations attached to their tweets. This gives researchers a very good resource so they can see when multiple people from an area start tweeting about the same symptoms. They can monitor the progression of the disease by seeing from which locations the tweets come from over time. But sometimes people complain but do not have a location attached, so such information can often be found from their profile. The article says though that some people will mess the surveys up will traveling or if on their homepage it says that they are located in: "Somewhere in my imagination" or in "Gondor, Middle-Earth" etc. So sometimes it's tricky, and the researchers don't get nearly as much information as they wanted to, but with what they have they can potentially help a lot with. One of these ways is when they are tracking a disease they can tell Twitter about it and they can send a kind of warning message to everybody telling them about the progression so as to prevent so many people from getting sick. While such a power could potentially be abused, I have faith that the Researchers at BYU will not abuse the power they have discovered.
Article: http://news.byu.edu/archive13-jan-twitter.aspx
This is certainly an interesting use of social media. I wonder how accurate it is, even with all the outliers.
ReplyDeleteI would say something about how long after they've gotten sick that members of this study started posting about it, but I think they've gotten something worked out.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, if I say so myself.
It is certainly a novel use of technology to tract disease. I wonder if it could be used to track the spread of new strains of the flue in new areas?
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