In a mobile health conference held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, MD on Wednesday, Dr. John Brownstein, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School's Center for BioInformatics, reported that 10% of restaurant reviews on Yelp were indeed related to food-borne illness like food poisonng and the hypotheses of consumers on which ingredient caused the disease are surprisingly accurate.
In a study conducted by Brownstein and he co-authored and published in Preventive Medicine last October said that Yelp can be used to be a real-time surveillance tool. Furthermore, they cited that cancellations on Open Table, an online service for booking restaurant reservations, are useful data source in times where there is a peak of cases of flu. . "By tapping into what tables are available at restaurants in different cities, you can actually map out flu," he told MedPage Today. That study was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
Subsequently, Facebook, the most popular social media sites with one-billion-plus-users, is another good source of reliable data. They geocoded the "likes" of sedentary lifestyle activities and compared them to the "likes" of physical activity. Hence, the study showed that the more likes of sedentary lifestyle mirrored the rate of obesity in the location indicated.
Furthermore, information dissemination on public health threats can be seen on data from Facebook, Twitter and online chat rooms. "What we're really interested in is what specific pieces of that data are related to disease and how we tap into that particular conversation set," he said.
Usually, he said that the knowledge of an outbreak of a disease happens through a ladder where the person reports to a health worker, the laboratory confirming the disease and data were reported to the health ministries. That is the time when they can already announce an outbreak. Now, health maps uses data from thousands of sources to determine thousands of diseases that usually go unreported especially in far flung areas.
They are currently building a way on how to use social media sites as a helpful guide to map and report diseases in their local places in order to prevent the sudden surge and spread of diseases just like what happened in West Africa.
