Twitter can help track public health

Washington: Your tweets may reveal if you are sick, according to scientists who have found that monitoring social media trends can help doctors quickly identify a rise of influenza, depression or other health issues in a specific area.

Public health trends on social media are more nuanced than looking for spikes of "I feel sick" or "flu."

To truly tap this source of public data, researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory sought to understand patterns of how people behave differently on social media when they are sick.

The researchers uncovered the expression of opinion and emotion as a potential signal on Twitter.

"Opinions and emotions are present in every tweet, regardless of whether the user is talking about their health," said Svitlana Volkova, a data scientist at PNNL and lead author of the study .

"Like a digital heartbeat, we're finding how changes in this behaviour relate to health trends in a community," said Volkova.

At a time when corporations mine information from social media accounts for targeted advertising and financial gain, researchers at PNNL asked how they could use this data to benefit the public.

One of those areas is public health. It takes health workers weeks to discover influenza trends the traditional way: by monitoring how many sick people visit clinics.