User:Zash236
Social Media Predicting Health Issues
As the use of technology continues to increase and become more accessible, social media has risen as a popular forum for conversing about public health. Twitter can be used to track symptoms and popular treatments of allergies by using the Ailment Topic Aspect Model[1]. People may feel more comfortable with disclosing their health struggles on social media, like reddit, because of the anonymity[2]. Tweets have also been used to narrow down specific topics insomniatics tweet about, to geographically find where tweets about obesity occur in the United States, and to find the happiest and saddest states in the United States [3][4][5]. However, the use of social media in predicting health issues is not just limited to Twitter; Instagram captions have also been used to understand the Pro-Eating Disorder communities on this site[6]. All in all, social media sites like Twitter and Instagram are great forums to gather information on various topics within the health sphere, especially for these three topics:
- Insomnia
- Mental Illness Severity
- Obesity
Twitter and Insomnia
Insomnia is a common mental health symptom for people around the world today, and it affects about 30% of the world's population[3]. The causes of Insomnia can be from both external or internal factors of people's lives. Although so many people struggle with some form of insomnia, most do not seek professional help. Therefore, it is very difficult to disseminate accurate information on how to overcome insomnia to insomniatics[3]. Social media is commonly used to disclose personal issues because it is an easy way to receive social support and there is a reduced social presence on these forums. Social media can actually be used to disseminate useful information to insomniatics[3]. By performing linguistic analysis via LInguistic Inquire Word Count (LIWC) on "insomnia" tweets versus non-specific tweets, it was found that people were disclosing their insomnia symptoms on Twitter, and were specifically talking about 2 major themes: describing the experience and coping with insomnia[3]. Therefore, it has been shown that people are sharing their experiences on Twitter when it comes to insomnia, and now professionals have more of an idea about what these Tweeters are talking about to better help insomniatics.
Instagram and Eating Disorders
The information people get from social media is not necessarily always good information, which is the case for Instagram’s pro-eating disorder communities. These communities inspire its followers and viewers to dedicate themselves to a lifestyle that isn’t mentally or physically beneficial for them and basically glorify eating disorders. These pages are indicative of future issues, like mental illnesses or suicidal thoughts, the posters and followers may have. Mental Illness Severity is basically a term that quantifies how severe a mental illness is. It is based off of the emotional instability, limitations in doing life activities, and cognitive function and judgment impairment that the mental illness causes[6]. Some indicators of these would be self injury and extreme weight control measures, like eating disorders. By using an algorithm looking at Instagram captions and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling, mental illness severity ratings can actually be calculated on a scale of low (1) to high (3)[6]. Therefore, people can now use the mental illness severity ratings to figure out how likely a person is to develop a mental illness and can provide people with proper help tailored to what they need.
Twitter and Obesity
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Obesity is now considered a global epidemic. Especially in the United States, portion sizes and processed foods can create an environment that values food and eating so much that it is unhealthy. If the current trend continues, 43% of US adults will be obese by 2018, which would also cause US spending to quadruple to $344 billion[4]. Obesity can cause other serious common disease like cancer, heart diseases, and diabetes. It is most commonly seen in people living in low-income areas[4]. If campaigns, like First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move!, can target where obesity is occurring the most in the United States and find out exactly what issues within obesity are being talked about, the obesity problem in the US can be narrowed down. By using Twitter, topic modeling via LDA modeling, and geocoding techniques, obesity tweets were found to be more common in the Eastern US and in large cities, especially near McDonald's[4]. Also, the major topics that these tweets are about include: childhood obesity and schools, obesity prevention, and food habits[4].
References
- ^ Paul, Michael J., and Mark Dredze. "You are what you Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for public health." ICWSM 20 (2011): 265-272.
- ^ De Choudhury, Munmun, and Sushovan De. "Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity." ICWSM. 2014.
- ^ a b c d e Jamison-Powell, Sue, et al. "I can't get no sleep: discussing# insomnia on twitter." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2012.
- ^ a b c d e Ghosh, Debarchana, and Rajarshi Guha. "What are we ‘tweeting’about obesity? Mapping tweets with topic modeling and Geographic Information System." Cartography and geographic information science 40.2 (2013): 90-102.
- ^ Lewis, et al. "The geography of happiness: Connecting twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place." PloS one 8.5 (2013): e64417.
- ^ a b c Chancellor, Stevie, et al. "Quantifying and Predicting Mental Illness Severity in Online Pro-Eating Disorder Communities." Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 2016.