Studies show that trends on social media sites like Twitter can be powerful clues to health issues in a community. For example, when a lot of people in the same town have the flu, they talk about their symptoms through social media before other formal kinds of surveillance could report the outbreak. The challenge for public health agencies is to pull out the relevant information from the huge volume of social media data to understand what’s happening in a community. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve with our new Web challenge: Now Trending - #Health in My Community.
We host several forums led by our Fusion Cell team – the group that gathers and analyzes large volumes of data to support decision making on public health response. The “Fusion Forums” help us engage the public health community and try to better understand stakeholder needs. At our most recent forum, state and local health agencies asked for our help in creating a web-based tool they could use that takes advantage of social media – Twitter to be specific – to help detect disease in real time. If health agencies can detect and track disease as it happens we can work together to minimize its spread. Health departments and doctors can use this social media information to detect local outbreaks, engage their patients and communities on trending health topics and quickly address health rumors. On a large scale, early awareness of a disease outbreak could help us save lives and potentially prevent pandemics.
We reviewed current analytical tools from federal agencies, non-government organizations, and private industry, and we couldn’t find this type of tool anywhere. While there were analytic tools out there, they all look at the data after traditional systems had already confirmed an outbreak. So, we are challenging individuals or teams to come up with the first ever (or at least we suspect it’s the first ever) web-based tool that uses open-source Twitter data to automatically deliver – in real-time – a list of the top five trending illnesses over a 24-hour period in a specified geographic region.
To win, the web-based app must be innovative, scalable, dynamic, and user-friendly, and it has to be able to send the data to state and local health agencies. These agencies, in turn, can cross-reference the data with traditional biosurveillance systems, build a baseline of trends, determine emerging public health threats, and advise the public on how to protect their health.
The person or team developing the best application wins $21,000 as well as a $1,000 travel stipend to attend an event announcing the winner. In addition, we’ll invite the winner to present the winning tool at an upcoming Fusion Forum. The winning application will have a chance to make a name for itself and make an important contribution in health IT and disaster preparedness as it’s used nationwide at state, territorial, tribal and local health agencies.
We’re excited to see applicants from all walks of life ranging from professional developers to freelancers to students. ASPR’s first web app challenge, the Facebook Lifeline App Challenge, went really well and the winners were two recent college grads, which is pretty cool!
Grab the details on our challenge at nowtrendingchallenge.com or #nowtrending2012 and spread the word!
