Our tweets may reveal if we 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 Social media.
"Opinions and emotions are present in every tweet/comment, regardless of whether the user is talking about their health," said a data scientist at PNNL and lead author of the study published in the journal EPJ Data Science . "Like a digital…
