In a study researchers have used social networking site Twitter to determine how factors like social status and exposure to pollution affects a person's health.
Last year, researchers used social networking site Twitter to predict how frequently a Twitter user can or does fall sick. This year, the same site has been used to determine how factors that make up a person's lifestyle can affected the health of that person.
"If you want to know, down to the individual level, how many people are sick in a population, you would have to survey the population, which is costly and time-consuming," said Adam Sadilek, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester. "Twitter and the technology we have developed allow us to do this passively, quickly and inexpensively; we can listen in to what people are saying and mine this data to make predictions."
Most Twitter updates or tweets contain geo-tagging that shows where a person was and when he posted the tweet. Through this, researchers were able to determine where and what the user was doing while he sent out the tweet. It also helped researcher determine the relationship a particular user shares with other users as well as with the environment.
At the International Conference on Web Searching and Data Mining in Rome, Italy, Sadilek presented a paper, February 8, which showed how his model could determine how a person's lifestyle affects his or her health.
"This app can be used by people to make personal decisions about their health. For example, they might want to avoid a subway station if it's full of sick people," Sadilek said. "It could also be used in conjunction with other methods by governments or local authorities to try to understand outbursts of the flu."
