Resumen de Geotagged US Tweets as Predictors of County-Level Health Outcomes, 2015-2016.
Quynh C. Nguyen, Matt McCullough, Hsien-wen Meng, Debjyoti Paul, Dapeng Li, Suraj Kath, Geoffrey Loomis, Elaine O. Nsoesie, Ming Wen, Ken R. Smith, Feifei Li
Objectives. To leverage geotagged Twitter data to create national indicators of the social environment, with small-area indicators of prevalent sentiment and social modeling of health behaviors, and to test associations with county-level health outcomes, while controlling for demographic characteristics. Methods. We used Twitter's streaming application programming interface to continuously collect a random 1% subset of publicly available geo-located tweets in the contiguous United States. We collected approximately 80 million geotagged tweets from 603 363 unique Twitter users in a 12-month period (April 2015-March 2016). Results. Across 3135 US counties, Twitter indicators of happiness, food, and physical activity were associated with lower premature mortality, obesity, and physical inactivity. Alcohol-use tweets predicted higher alcohol-use-related mortality. Conclusions. Socialmedia represents a newtype of real-time data thatmay enable public healthofficials toexaminemovement ofnorms, sentiment, andbehaviors thatmayportend emerging issues or outbreaks--thus providing a way to intervene to prevent adverse health events and measure the impact of health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
