tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
"MY MOTHER is suspected of having dengue," tweets a woman in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. "I think I have dengue. Hopefully I'm wrong!" tweets a man in S?o Paulo, 350 kilometres away.
These short messages posted on Twitter might not seem much, but when the dengue season begins again in Brazil this November, tweets like this could help the country better control outbreaks of a virus that kills hundreds of people each year.
That's thanks to software created by a collaboration between two Brazilian National Institutes of Science and Technology, led by Wagner Meira, a computer scientist at the Federal University of Minus Gerais. The team has used it to identify a high correlation between the time and place where people tweet they have dengue and the official statistics for where the disease appears each season.
Social media has been used in real-time surveillance of diseases before; Twitter was used to follow the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for example. But this is the first time it has been used to track dengue fever, and the first time data on the scale of individual cities has been collected in this way. It is also the first attempt to pick up on people tweeting about their personal experience of a disease.
...
http://www.newscientist.com/article...in-brazil.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
These short messages posted on Twitter might not seem much, but when the dengue season begins again in Brazil this November, tweets like this could help the country better control outbreaks of a virus that kills hundreds of people each year.
That's thanks to software created by a collaboration between two Brazilian National Institutes of Science and Technology, led by Wagner Meira, a computer scientist at the Federal University of Minus Gerais. The team has used it to identify a high correlation between the time and place where people tweet they have dengue and the official statistics for where the disease appears each season.
Social media has been used in real-time surveillance of diseases before; Twitter was used to follow the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for example. But this is the first time it has been used to track dengue fever, and the first time data on the scale of individual cities has been collected in this way. It is also the first attempt to pick up on people tweeting about their personal experience of a disease.
...
http://www.newscientist.com/article...in-brazil.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news