Twitter, as explained by its founders was meant to be like a “short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” However, today Twitter is changing the face of mass medical communication and surveillance across the globe and providing data of great significance.
Use of social media has skyrocketed and embedded itself into our everyday lives. With the powerful tools such as Twitter trends, health epidemiologists and public health organizations have begun to use online data to track the activity levels of influenza and other infectious diseases. In the recent events like #H7N9 (human infection of avian influenza A) outbreak in China and #MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus) in the Gulf, Twitter came into spotlight because of its great potential to be a timely and cost-effective source of data for surveillance and information broadcasting.
However, the challenge is to make sense of 58 million tweets posted every day or 1 billion tweets in every 5 days. Our ability through APIs and algorithms generated by data scientists help us in filtering tweets indicating influenza infection through keyword queries along with #tags like fever, flu, cold etc whereas it will eliminate the noise such as “Bieber” with “fever” which is obviously not related to viral flu.
Tweets uncovers disease with accurate stats
Recent research on influenza surveillance suggested that, after removing noise tweets can predict influenza prevalence with accuracy of 85%. Along with accuracy, Twitter can help us in providing a detailed scenario such as where disease is breaking out, since many tweets are tagged with their locations, giving ample time to local bodies to face the medical emergencies.
Apart from mere surveillance, Twitter plays far more important role in information broadcasting through public health bodies. During the recent outbreak of H7N9 and MERS, @WHO (World Health Organization) and @CDCgov (Center for Disease Control and Preventions) not only tweeted about incidence and prevalence of infectious disease but also updated us about the primary symptoms and prevention measures.
The source of #H7N9 infection is still under investigation. So far, there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission
— WHO (@WHO) January 27, 2014
— WHO (@WHO) January 3, 2014
Twitter has also proven its potential in spreading awareness about various non-communicable diseases such are obesity, cardiovascular disorders, dementia etc. Using the same tweet geo-tagging tools, researchers can estimate the prevalence of specific conditions in particular geographic boundaries, hence providing key information to Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) which are critical channels for the delivery of health promotion programs. Usually, where the information booklet takes days to a couple of weeks to reach the community medical centers, twitter #tags and #Chats makes information delivery process almost instantaneous with wider reach.
The power of Twitter in the medical field
Today, Twitter has successfully demonstrated that social media could be a useful measure of public awareness and reaction to disease outbreak information released by health authorities. Being faster is an advantage to twitter whereas the nature of massive tweets makes it convoluted for researchers to validate data generated from it. In current scenarios and with available technology, twitter makes a novel complementary tool, rather than a replacement for the traditional methods of gathering information. Maybe, in the future with better algorithms and filters researchers will understand the data more clearly, which will eventually change the face of ‘medical surveillance and information broadcasting’.