Is Twitter a better predictor of the flu than Google and the CDC? Researcher says, yes
Posted By Arundhati Parmar On January 21, 2013 @ 1:32 pm In Featured Story,Health IT,Hospitals,MedCity News eNewsletter,Medical Devices,Pharma,Politics,Startups,SYN,Top Story | 3 Comments
[1][Photo Credit: Adam Sadilek, University of Rochester]
And the key to controlling the influenza or any contagion is not only early detection, but also in predicting the trajectory of the disease.
Here, social media, especially Twitter, is playing a big role.
Adam Sadilek, a researcher with professor Henry Kautz [3] in the computer science department at the University of Rochester, has done an interesting and rather extraordinary experiment [4].
Using Twitter and geo-tagging, Sadilek has modeled how an infectious disease may spread in real time by plotting data on a map using tweets from people and seeing how healthy people and sick people interact. That led them to create a heat map of New York.
Sadilek asserts that this shows “emergent aggregate patterns in real time with second-by-second resolution,” which apparently suffers none of the time lag that other, more established models coming from the likes of Google Flu Trends [5] and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.
You can see a video of how the flu overtook the Big Apple over one day here:
3 Comments (Open | Close)
Article printed from MedCity News: http://medcitynews.com
URL to article: http://medcitynews.com/2013/01/twitter-needs-to-have-an-alias-how-about-the-centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://medcitynews.com/wp-content/uploads/twitterflu.png
[2] particularly pernicious flu season: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/01/18/flu-season-hard-on-kids-elderly-and-its-still-not-over/
[3] Henry Kautz: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/kautz/
[4] extraordinary experiment: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~sadilek/research/
[5] Google Flu Trends: http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Click here to print.
3 Comments To "Is Twitter a better predictor of the flu than Google and the CDC? Researcher says, yes"
#1 Comment By jon On January 22, 2013 @ 10:42 am
I wish I never had to enter a classroom either. I think this was a very unique and well writtened article. Social media platforms play a very important roll in throughout the world. We at Pacific Medical are using them to to assist are marketing department. I would have never guessed twitter could be used to predict the flu.
Jonathan George
Social Media Associate
Pacific Medical LLC
#2 Comment By Erick Kinuthia On January 22, 2013 @ 10:47 am
Great thought Parmar. Many individuals seem to use twitter. Doctors should therefore not only use it in detecting flue outbreaks,but also in marketing of their medical services.
Erick Kinuthia
Team MDwebpro.com
#3 Comment By Arundhati Parmar On January 22, 2013 @ 2:44 pm
Jonathan, thanks for your kind words and for taking the time to read my bio.