The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media.

ABSTRACT: We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the "caloric content" of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of "caloric input", "caloric output", and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population's hea

SUBMITTER: Alajajian SE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5302853 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature