Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter

Ed Quincey; Patty Kostkova

Electronic Healthcare. Second International ICST Conference, eHealth 2009, Istanbul, Turkey, September 23-15, 2009, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter

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@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4,
    author={Ed Quincey and Patty Kostkova},
    title={Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter},
    proceedings={Electronic Healthcare. Second International ICST Conference, eHealth 2009, Istanbul, Turkey, September 23-15, 2009, Revised Selected Papers},
    proceedings_a={E-HEALTH},
    year={2012},
    month={5},
    keywords={Epidemic Intelligence social networking swine flu},
    doi={10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4}
}

Ed Quincey
Patty Kostkova
Year: 2012
Early Warning and Outbreak Detection Using Social Networking Websites: The Potential of Twitter
E-HEALTH
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4

Ed Quincey¹^,*, Patty Kostkova¹

1: City University

*Contact email: ed.de.quincey@city.ac.uk

Abstract

Epidemic Intelligence is being used to gather information about potential diseases outbreaks from both formal and increasingly informal sources. A potential addition to these informal sources are social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In this paper we describe a method for extracting messages, called “tweets” from the Twitter website and the results of a pilot study which collected over 135,000 tweets in a week during the current Swine Flu pandemic.

Keywords: Epidemic Intelligence social networking swine flu

Published: 2012-05-28

: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11745-9_4