Extracting signals from social media for chronic disease surveillance

Asthma is a chronic disease that affects people of all ages, and is a serious health and economic concern worldwide. However, accurate and timely surveillance and predicting hospital visits could allow for targeted interventions and reduce the societal burden of asthma. Current national asthma disease surveillance systems can have data availability lags of up to months and years. Rapid progress has been made in gathering social media data to perform disease surveillance and prediction. We introduce novel methods for extracting signals from social media data to assist in accurate and timely asthma surveillance. Our empirical analyses show that our methods are very effective for surveillance of asthma prevalence at both state and municipal levels. They are also useful for predicting the number of hospital visits based on near-real-Time social media data for specific geographic areas. Our results can be used for public health surveillance, ED preparedness, and targeted patient interventions.