White papers & research links

This is the page for any white papers or research links helping our project.

• From the class Forum: mapping malaria http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513721/big-data-from-cheap-phones/

Some research papers:

-Bilge, U.; Bozkurt, S.; Yolcular, B. O. & Ozel, D. Can social web help to detect influenza related illnesses in Turkey? Stud Health Technol Inform, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey. ubilge@akdeniz.edu.tr, 2012, 174, 100-104

Abstract: In this study, a content analysis of Twitter is carried out to determine the frequency of tweets mentioning influenza like illnesses (swine flu, cold etc.) and results have been compared with news articles, Google search trends and national health statistics in Turkey. Between 1st January 2009 and 31st December 2010, over 4,165 influenza-related Turkish posts on Twitter and 10,000 news articles in three leading Turkish newspaper websites containing influenza related keywords have been analyzed. No strong correlation has been found between influenza related online data and the real world records. Although there is no significant relationship, this study shows that there is a huge amount of data can be harvested from the social web applications such as Twitter.

-Borondo, J.; Morales, A. J.; Losada, J. C. & Benito, R. M. Characterizing and modeling an electoral campaign in the context of Twitter: 2011 Spanish Presidential election as a case study. Chaos, Grupo de Sistemas Complejos and Departamento de Física y Mecánica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, ETSI Agrónomos, 28040 Madrid, Spain., 2012, 22, 023138

Abstract: Transmitting messages in the most efficient way as possible has always been one of politicians' main concerns during electoral processes. Due to the rapidly growing number of users, online social networks have become ideal platforms for politicians to interact with their potential voters. Exploiting the available potential of these tools to maximize their influence over voters is one of politicians' actual challenges. To step in this direction, we have analyzed the user activity in the online social network Twitter, during the 2011 Spanish Presidential electoral process, and found that such activity is correlated with the election results. We introduce a new measure to study political sentiment in Twitter, which we call the relative support. We have also characterized user behavior by analyzing the structural and dynamical patterns of the complex networks emergent from the mention and retweet networks. Our results suggest that the collective attention is driven by a very small fraction of users. Furthermore, we have analyzed the interactions taking place among politicians, observing a lack of debate. Finally, we develop a network growth model to reproduce the interactions taking place among politicians.

-Chew, C. & Eysenbach, G. Pandemics in the age of Twitter: content analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PLoS One, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health Network, Toronto, Canada., 2010, 5, e14118

Abstract: Surveys are popular methods to measure public perceptions in emergencies but can be costly and time consuming. We suggest and evaluate a complementary "infoveillance" approach using Twitter during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Our study aimed to: 1) monitor the use of the terms "H1N1" versus "swine flu" over time; 2) conduct a content analysis of "tweets"; and 3) validate Twitter as a real-time content, sentiment, and public attention trend-tracking tool.Between May 1 and December 31, 2009, we archived over 2 million Twitter posts containing keywords "swine flu," "swineflu," and/or "H1N1." using Infovigil, an infoveillance system. Tweets using "H1N1" increased from 8.8% to 40.5% (R(2) = .788; p.001), indicating a gradual adoption of World Health Organization-recommended terminology. 5,395 tweets were randomly selected from 9 days, 4 weeks apart and coded using a tri-axial coding scheme. To track tweet content and to test the feasibility of automated coding, we created database queries for keywords and correlated these results with manual coding. Content analysis indicated resource-related posts were most commonly shared (52.6. 4.5% of cases were identified as misinformation. News websites were the most popular sources (23.2, while government and health agencies were linked only 1.5% of the time. 7/10 automated queries correlated with manual coding. Several Twitter activity peaks coincided with major news stories. Our results correlated well with H1N1 incidence data.This study illustrates the potential of using social media to conduct "infodemiology" studies for public health. 2009 H1N1-related tweets were primarily used to disseminate information from credible sources, but were also a source of opinions and experiences. Tweets can be used for real-time content analysis and knowledge translation research, allowing health authorities to respond to public concerns.

-King, D.; Ramirez-Cano, D.; Greaves, F.; Vlaev, I.; Beales, S. & Darzi, A. Twitter and the health reforms in the English National Health Service. Health Policy, Centre for Health Policy, Imperial College London, 10th Floor QEQM, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1NY, United Kingdom. Electronic address: dominic.king@imperial.ac.uk., 2013, 110, 291-297

Abstract: Social media (for example Facebook and YouTube) uses online and mobile technologies to allow individuals to participate in, comment on and create user-generated content. Twitter is a widely used social media platform that lets users post short publicly available text-based messages called tweets that other users can respond to. Alongside traditional media outlets, Twitter has been a focus for discussions about the controversial and radical reforms to the National Health Service (NHS) in England that were recently passed into law by the current coalition Government. Looking at over 120,000 tweets made about the health reforms, we have investigated whether any insights can be obtained about the role of Twitter in informing, debating and influencing opinion in a specific area of health policy. In particular we have looked at how the sentiment of tweets changed with the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill through Parliament, and how this compared to conventional opinion polls taken over the same time period. We examine which users appeared to have the most influence in the 'Twittersphere' and suggest how a widely used metric of academic impact - the H-index - could be applied to measure context-dependent influence on Twitter.

-Greaves, F.; Ramirez-Cano, D.; Millett, C.; Darzi, A. & Donaldson, L. Harnessing the cloud of patient experience: using social media to detect poor quality healthcare. BMJ Qual Saf, Department of Primary Care and Public Health, Imperial College London, UK. felix.greaves08@imperial.ac.uk, 2013, 22, 251-255

Abstract: Recent years have seen increasing interest in patient-centred care and calls to focus on improving the patient experience. At the same time, a growing number of patients are using the internet to describe their experiences of healthcare. We believe the increasing availability of patients' accounts of their care on blogs, social networks, Twitter and hospital review sites presents an intriguing opportunity to advance the patient-centred care agenda and provide novel quality of care data. We describe this concept as a 'cloud of patient experience'. In this commentary, we outline the ways in which the collection and aggregation of patients' descriptions of their experiences on the internet could be used to detect poor clinical care. Over time, such an approach could also identify excellence and allow it to be built on. We suggest using the techniques of natural language processing and sentiment analysis to transform unstructured descriptions of patient experience on the internet into usable measures of healthcare performance. We consider the various sources of information that could be used, the limitations of the approach and discuss whether these new techniques could detect poor performance before conventional measures of healthcare quality.

-R Lyles, C.; López, A.; Pasick, R. & Sarkar, U. "5 Mins of uncomfyness is better than dealing with cancer 4 a lifetime": an exploratory qualitative analysis of cervical and breast cancer screening dialogue on twitter._ J Cancer Educ_, Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA, LylesC@medsfgh.ucsf.edu., 2013, 28, 127-133

Abstract: Twitter.com is a "micro-blogging" website. Although Twitter use is growing rapidly, little is known about health behavior discussions on this site, even though a majority of messages are publicly available. We retrieved publicly available Twitter messages during a 5-week period in early 2012, searching separately for the terms "Pap smear" and "mammogram." We used content analysis to code each 140-character message, generating a separate coding framework for each cancer screening term and calculating the frequencies of comments. Using the brief account description, we also coded the author as individual, organization, or news media outlet. There were 203 Pap smear and 271 mammogram messages coded, over three fourths of which were from individual accounts. Overall, 22 % of Pap smear messages and 25 % of mammogram messages discussed personal experiences, including attending appointments, negative sentiment about the procedure, and results. Other messages from both individuals and organizations (8 % Pap smear, 18 % mammogram) promoted screening. About one quarter of the messages expressed personal experiences with cancer screening. This demonstrates that Twitter can be a rich source of information and could be used to design new health-related interventions.

-Signorini, A.; Segre, A. M. & Polgreen, P. M. The use of Twitter to track levels of disease activity and public concern in the U.S. during the influenza A H1N1 pandemic. PLoS One, Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, United States of America., 2011, 6, e19467

Abstract: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its millions of users to send and read each other's "tweets," or short, 140-character messages. The service has more than 190 million registered users and processes about 55 million tweets per day. Useful information about news and geopolitical events lies embedded in the Twitter stream, which embodies, in the aggregate, Twitter users' perspectives and reactions to current events. By virtue of sheer volume, content embedded in the Twitter stream may be useful for tracking or even forecasting behavior if it can be extracted in an efficient manner. In this study, we examine the use of information embedded in the Twitter stream to (1) track rapidly-evolving public sentiment with respect to H1N1 or swine flu, and (2) track and measure actual disease activity. We also show that Twitter can be used as a measure of public interest or concern about health-related events. Our results show that estimates of influenza-like illness derived from Twitter chatter accurately track reported disease levels.

• Integrating Social Media into Emergency-Preparedness Efforts Raina M. Merchant, M.D., Stacy Elmer, M.A., and Nicole Lurie, M.D., M.S.P.H. N Engl J Med 2011; 365:289-291July 28, 2011DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1103591 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1103591