Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Can Twitter be good for public health?
From CNET News, via my colleague, Sean Ness:
Sick City is a new Twitter mashup that tracks people's tweets
about being sick, having sore throats, and other physical maladies. The public health benefit of this? "The tool lets you track these occurrences both by city and each specific ailment. And the stats go back to the last 31 days, which can show you if a certain type of sickness is trending."
This is not an entirely new idea. Google tracked flu trends last November based on people's searches on Google.com, along with historic data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And I just read about how, in Canada, Google searches for "listeriosis" spiked last summer, at least a month before the official announcement of a deadly outbreak of listeria that eventually killed 20 people. Finally, I have always been a big fan of the WhoIsSick mashup (mostly because I find it amusing), though the small number of people who self-report on the site probably means it would never be a very effective public health tool.
It remains to be seen whether SickCity will be any more effective than WhoIsSick, depending on how many people actually tweet about their health symptoms and the tool's ability to capture information about location. Coming soon as an additional source of data for SickCity will be status updates from Facebook.
Added: I forgot to mention that the Canadian Medical Association published this week an article entitled, "Early detection of disease outbreaks using the Internet." You can download a free PDF here.