Edo-Osagie Oduwa, De La Iglesia Beatriz, Lake Iain, Edeghere Obaghe
School of Computing Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK.
School of Computing Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK.
Comput Biol Med. 2020 Jul;122:103770. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.103770. Epub 2020 May 16.
Public health practitioners and researchers have used traditional medical databases to study and understand public health for a long time. Recently, social media data, particularly Twitter, has seen some use for public health purposes. Every large technological development in history has had an impact on the behaviour of society. The advent of the internet and social media is no different. Social media creates public streams of communication, and scientists are starting to understand that such data can provide some level of access into the people's opinions and situations. As such, this paper aims to review and synthesize the literature on Twitter applications for public health, highlighting current research and products in practice. A scoping review methodology was employed and four leading health, computer science and cross-disciplinary databases were searched. A total of 755 articles were retreived, 92 of which met the criteria for review. From the reviewed literature, six domains for the application of Twitter to public health were identified: (i) Surveillance; (ii) Event Detection; (iii) Pharmacovigilance; (iv) Forecasting; (v) Disease Tracking; and (vi) Geographic Identification. From our review, we were able to obtain a clear picture of the use of Twitter for public health. We gained insights into interesting observations such as how the popularity of different domains changed with time, the diseases and conditions studied and the different approaches to understanding each disease, which algorithms and techniques were popular with each domain, and more.
长期以来，公共卫生从业者和研究人员一直使用传统医学数据库来研究和理解公共卫生。最近，社交媒体数据，尤其是推特，已在一定程度上用于公共卫生目的。历史上每一项重大技术发展都会对社会行为产生影响。互联网和社交媒体的出现也不例外。社交媒体创造了公共交流渠道，科学家们开始认识到这类数据能够提供一定程度的对民众观点和状况的洞察。因此，本文旨在回顾和综合关于推特在公共卫生领域应用的文献，突出当前的研究和实际应用的产品。采用了一种范围综述方法，并检索了四个领先的健康、计算机科学和跨学科数据库。共检索到755篇文章，其中92篇符合综述标准。从综述文献中，确定了推特应用于公共卫生的六个领域：（i）监测；（ii）事件检测；（iii）药物警戒；（iv）预测；（v）疾病追踪；以及（vi）地理识别。通过我们的综述，我们能够清晰地了解推特在公共卫生中的应用情况。我们深入了解了一些有趣的观察结果，比如不同领域的受欢迎程度如何随时间变化、所研究的疾病和状况、理解每种疾病的不同方法、每个领域流行的算法和技术等等。
