New Research Monitors Public Perception Of Swine Flu Outbreaks Using Technology From Realtime Search Engine, OneRiot

Main Category: Swine Flu
Also Included In: IT / Internet / E-mail;  Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses;  Flu / Cold / SARS
Article Date: 30 Apr 2009 - 9:00 PDT

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Researchers at the University of Iowa today announced a major study to track public perception of the swine flu outbreak and other infectious diseases, utilizing a unique, realtime index of the social web from OneRiot.

The project, Social Web Information Monitoring for Health, dubbed "SWIM for Health," has the potential to enhance disease tracking and forecasting by harnessing the power of the social web. OneRiot's technology organizes social information from across the web in realtime - including updates from Twitter and Facebook, recent blog posts, current popular search queries and other web usage activity - to provide a realtime index of information from the social web.

SWIM for Health is being conducted as part of the University of Iowa's interdisciplinary Computational Epidemiology research group (CompEpi). The Iowa CompEpi group applies computational methods to help solve public health problems, including new disease surveillance methods and harnessing technology for disease prevention.

According to Iowa CompEpi faculty Philip Polgreen, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, "Analyzing and aggregating realtime data from the social web is a unique enhancement to traditional disease surveillance systems."

SWIM for Health is spearheaded by researcher Alessio Signorini, PhD candidate at the University of Iowa and Director of Search Technology at OneRiot. Signorini will use the large amount of realtime data provided by OneRiot, in conjunction with official public health surveillance data, to discern patterns in disease diffusion and public perception of health scare outbreaks. Previous studies have shown the benefit of analyzing data abstracted from internet searches in forecasting seasonal influenza. SWIM for Health supplements such search data with OneRiot's realtime information from across the social web, reflecting the web content people are sharing with friends (e,g, relevant videos, news stories and blog posts) as well as what they are talking about on social networks.

Source:
OneRiot

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