Researchers Believe Twitter Can Be Used to Mitigate The Risk of Disease Outbreaks

By: Jeff Stewart  |   December 7th, 2012   |   Health, Living, News

Many people believe that Twitter is nothing more than a micro-blogging website where users spend time have fun with friends or update themselves with the latest news and information from their favourite celebrities and tweeters. However this is just one part of the site’s true power, as Twitter is much more than a medium for passing time. This platform has an immense flow of information and numerous groups around the world study it to determine or predict public interest, opinions, stock market trends, box office trends and a lot more.

 

However in order to determine these things, observers require a lot of time and hard work as crunching such huge data in real time can be a considerable task. To sort this issue, the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain’s Manuel Garcia-Herranz along with some associates have found a solution. According to them, the best approach does not involve keeping track of an unlimited number of users or data sets because all this can be done simply by following a group of highly connected Twitter users, which they dub “sensors”. These highly impactful users dictate a vast amount of information on Twitter and are therefore the best indicator of growing trends and updated information.

 

To prove their point, Garcia-Herranz and company tested this approach by selecting two different groups of users. They picked the first group randomly and named it the control group. They then craftily put together a list of highly connected users from the lists of people being ‘Followed’ by the first group.

 

They named the second group Sensors. By crunching 6 months of past data of both these groups, Garcia-Herranz and friends came to know that the Sensor group had gotten more connections or friends than control group, and received new hashtags about 7 days before their control counterparts. This information proved an old researcher line which goes, “Your friends have more friends than you do!”

 

This was an important discovery by Garcia-Herranz and company that can also be used to monitor various factors such as economic growth, political revolutions, elections, public health and so on.

 

Of the aforementioned factors, monitoring public health through the Sensor groups on Twitter could prove very helpful as Garcia-Herranz and friends said that “Google or other companies that monitor flu-related search terms might be able to get high-quality, real-time information about a real-world epidemic with greater lead time, giving public-health officials even more time to plan a response”.

 

This means that sensor groups on Twitter would act more as an alert system that will warn governments and concerned departments to take measures before a disease or any sort of civil unrest outbreaks. However, the major concern about these Sensor groups on Twitter is that they can become targets to influence both governments and general public. Therefore, before adapting this approach of Garcia-Herranz and friends it is important that significant measures should be taken to avoid any undue influence. Otherwise it will warp the entire system.

 

Source: TechnologyReview