Most people now express their feelings and life events on social media. But do you know that these posts, according to a new study, offer valuable information about the connection between everyday routine and their health?
A team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that many people who use Facebook and Twitter shared their social media and medical data for research purposes. The team said that by building a databank of languages, there might be a possibility to link social media data to health results.
The research senior author, Raina M Merchant, director of the Social Media and Health Innovation Lab and an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at Penn Medicine said people don't often think about the data they post. Little did they know that this information can offer valuable insights into the connection between our everyday lives and our health. She also added that people often finding ways to effectively utilize the data that could prove to be a valuable source of information about how and why patients communicate about their health.
With this information, we have a higher potential to identify health trends for both the individual level and general public, creating educational campaigns and more. Another unique part of this data is that we can connect the social media data with validated information from a health record.
During the research, patients who visited the Emergency Department were asked if they are using social media and if they would be willing to share their social media and medical data with health researchers, for research purposes. The research database of language and social media data give the researchers the key to draw relationship between participants' online content and their health status.
More than 1,000 participants agreed to share their social media and medical data over the last seven months. Data from as far back as 2009 were analyzed. Nearly 1.4 million posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter with about 12 million words. The team found that variations in word complexity can suggest cognitive decline or perhaps if the post has few words from the last few weeks it may indicative of a depressed mental status.
Some contents posted also revealed information about adherence to medications, new medical conditions, or health behaviors like exercise and diets. Researchers said that individuals with a diagnosis in their medical record were more likely to use words related to that diagnosis on Facebook than patients without that diagnosis.
