Crowdsourcing Health

On July 7th Mathew Ingram at GigaOM notes that the Internet is one of the first places many people go to research symptoms or illnesses they have (or think they might have), and social networks like Twitter have also become a hotbed of symptom-sharing and health advice. But can anyone discover useful knowledge from all of this information? Two researchers at Johns Hopkins University say they can — with a little bit of effort. They analyzed more than two billion tweets for health-related terms and say their research shows Twitter can be a valuable source of public-health information about a wide range of ailments.

The results showed some intriguing patterns about everything from allergies and the flu to other illnesses and ailments such as cancer, obesity and depression. And because many people posted details of the medications they were using to treat themselves, they discovered a number of users were taking antibiotics to treat the flu, even though antibiotics don’t work on the flu — something that could be a potential public-health issue.

The Johns Hopkins study isn’t the first to try to pull public-health information out of the online activity of millions of users. One of the first examples of such an effort was Google’s Flu Trends , which showed there was some predictive value in watching the almost real-time searches for information about the flu and symptoms. When this data was mapped geographically, it showed in some cases how the influenza was spreading, as more and more people started using Google to search for information about the illness. There have been other studies that focused on using Twitter to track and model flu symptoms as well.

The Center for Disease Control has been monitoring some of these tools for several years, including working with Google Flu Trends (which published some research here), and others have been trying to apply the same process for different medical issues. HealthMap is a site designed to monitor — and potentially predict — disease outbreaks, and has been working with the CDC to track health trends. The site recently started an early-warning system aimed at tracking diseases that move between animals and people.
Meanwhile, a startup called Sickweather is trying to apply these same tools to local health issues, by using data from Twitter and Facebook to create “weather maps” of illnesses and predict where medical issues might arise.

This is part of a trend that a growing number of people are talking about. Here on this blog I have talked about “Populomics”. Other terms including “Syndemics” and “big data” in one way or another all have been used to refer to the potential for analyzing massive and diverse data sets for valuable information, whether it’s Twitter, NASA weather data or the clickstream of people using Google search. The ability to collect data in almost real-time and detect patterns has huge implications across a wide variety of disciplines including health disparities. And if we continue sharing information at the rate Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks we will, there will be plenty of data to choose work with.