Tracking Disease Trends

Would you like to track dieases over on Twitter? Now with Mappy Health you can track them quick and easy. Mappy Health is an application to help public health surveillance. They can track the disease trends whether they are good or bad. It will show you if more diseases are showing up or are decreasing in your area.

How Does The Mappy Health App Track Diseases?

• Mining Twitter Data – They go through the “social” noise via a streaming API that happens every day on Twitter
• Fetch Real Time Data – As it’s happening on the Twitter – looking for at least one match of 234 disease terms tracked across 26 conditions
• Analyze Each Tweet – To see which of the 26 condition sets it matches

The trending and filtering is done by a series of algorithms and map-reduce jobs. It is then presented in a variety of visual ways. As of now the service is in areas that speak English but will be expanded upon in the near future. The app may be used on your PC, tablet or phone.

You can also view their ticker across the top of the website as to what disease is trending now. It looks like a stock ticker tracking the stock market.

You can also see the disease trends over time or by disease keywords. With the keywords it shows you 10 different qualifier matches: ill, death, drug, dr., got, med, not, have, has and don’t. The biggest disease spikes were for H5N1.  We did not find that surprising with our Latest on Swine Flu page being constantly updated with more swine flu instances around the world. Another spike has shown for West Nile Virus which has been the worst in a decade to date in the United States.

There are several other nursing apps out there, have you used any to track diseases?

Will you be downloading  the Mappy Health App soon?