Publication Details
A New Age of Public Health: Identifying Disease Outbreaks by Analyzing Tweets
Dreesman Johannes (NLGA)
Krieck Manuela (NLGA)
Otrusina Lubomír, Ing. (DCGM FIT BUT)
Twitter Analysis, Epidemic Intelligence, Content Analysis, User
Study
Traditional disease surveillance is a very time consuming
reporting process. Cases of notifiable diseases are reported to the
different levels in the national health care system before actions
can be taken. But, early detection of disease activity followed by
a rapid response is crucial to reduce the impact of epidemics. To
address this challenge, alternative sources of information are
investigated for disease surveillance. In this paper, the relevance
of twitter messages outbreak detection is investigated from two
directions. First, Twitter messages potentially related to disease
outbreaks are retrospectively searched and analyzed. Second,
incoming twitter messages are assessed with respect to their
relevance for outbreak detection. The studies show that twitter
messages can be - to a certain extent - highly relevant for early
detecting hints to public health threats.
@INPROCEEDINGS{FITPUB9824, author = "Kerstin Denecke and Johannes Dreesman and Manuela Krieck and Lubom\'{i}r Otrusina", title = "A New Age of Public Health: Identifying Disease Outbreaks by Analyzing Tweets", pages = "10--15", booktitle = "Proceedings of Health WebScience Workshop, ACM Web Science Conference", year = 2011, location = "Koblenz, DE", publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery", language = "english", url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/9824" }