First posted on February 2, 2013.
The SmartBrief headline was too good not to click—"Researchers Use
Twitter to Try to Catch Colds". It lead me to computer science
researchers at Johns Hopkins who have an active public health research
program based on analysis of tweets.
They’ve studied allergies and found that people not only talked about
them on twitter but many of them were taking the wrong medications.
They’ve also studied headaches and the spread of flu. The SmartBlog post gives information on how they do it.
CS
doctoral student Michael Paul comments that using Twitter to do this
type of research is much faster than traditional public health
information gathering, but less accurate.
So consider it another weapon in the growing arsenal of health-related social media tools!
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