A friend of mine has been tweeting about a very interesting use of Twitter.
Paul Watson responded to the challenge from DIYcity to build “an early warning system for outbreaks of flu, colds and other communicable disease at the city level”.
Paul’s design is to correlate twitter trends and location information to identify when people start talking about the flu. Then he can compare these stats against expected trends to identify possible spikes. Paul plans to use twitter to send out warnings and you can subscribe to these feeds to receive early warning of an outbreak.
Note Google did something similar for the US based on search terms but without the warning system.
How reliable will the twitter trends be? Time will tell but what’s fascinating about the Google data is you can see their results compare well with data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
I hope we’ll see similar results with the twitter data.
This is a fascinating application, it’s built using data that is easy to access and with technology that is easy to use and open-source. To think that you would have probably needed the cooperation of the military to do something like this a few years ago.
March 17th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Hi Des
Your friend is definitely on the right track, Twitter’s real time data really should be able to indicate emerging flu epidemics. Check out FluTweet at http://www.flutweet.com, it’s doing that already.
All in all, it’s very interesting what you can do with Twitter, there is also a stock-following application for example.
March 18th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hi Ilkka
FluTweet looks very similar to what Paul is doing at http://sickcity.org
The only difference I can see is they’re adding Facebook data too.
Maybe you should work together.