Using social media to track health trends has only increased in recent years. Groups such as hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and the Centers for Disease Control have sought to harness health data to track pandemics, tweak their patient outreach approach to understanding what people are saying about their drugs. So for a company that likens its technology to a Doppler radar, scanning social media networks for references to illnesses, Sickweather’s deal with the Weather Channel’s owners to apply its tool on a hyperlocal level must seem especially fitting.
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Sickweather will track conversations on social media and analyze the sentiment using machine learning and natural language processing, a news release said. The Cold and Flu Tracker will be available on Weather.com, Theraflu.com and the Weather Channel’s app.
As part of the agreement, IBM, which owns The Weather Company, is licensing Sickweather’s tech. Sickweather developed a new API endpoints to provide them data for both their consumer-facing integration as well as an advertising component.
Another milestone with this deal is that it’s the first time in the 15 years since Weather.com launched that it has trusted a flu data provider other than the Centers for Disease Control, Sickweather founder and CEO Graham Dodge said in response to emailed questions.
“When their website launched in 2001, it included a health section and flu map even back then, and that map has remained relatively unchanged until now,” using only information at the state level with CDC data.
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The Weather Company deal isn’t the first licensing coup Sickweather has scored. Dodge noted that Johnson & Johnson licenses its data for J&J’s HealthyDay app, another illness tracking app leveraging social media. He added that Sickweather also has a licensing deal with AccuWeather. But the partnership with The Weather Company promises the most brand exposure for Sickweather to date, said Dodge.
“It will significantly impact the audience size for our own apps.,” Dodge said. “We’ve already seen growth of 200 percent and it’s not even flu season yet.”
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