You Are What You Tweet: Tracking Public Health Trends from Twitter Messages

by Phil Sneiderman, John Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University researchers have developed software that can track public health trends using Twitter feeds. Researchers Mark Dredze and Michael J. Paul analyzed 2 billion tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 and used software to filter out the 1.5 million messages that referenced public health issues.

The software disregards tweets that do not relate directly to a user’s health, even if it contains a word commonly used in a health context. In about 200,000 of the health-related tweets, the researchers were able to draw on user-provided public information to identify the geographic state from which the message was sent, enabling them to track some trends by time and place, such as when the allergy and flu seasons peaked in various parts of the country.

“Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be a useful source of public health information,” Dredze says. “There have been some narrow studies using Twitter posts, for example, to track the flu,” Dredze said. “But to our knowledge, no one has ever used tweets to look at as many health issues as we did.”  “In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters’ doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home.”

The researchers say that future studies of tweets could uncover even more useful data, not only about posters’ medical problems but also about public perceptions concerning illnesses, medications, and other health issues.

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