Comparing Twitter data to routine data sources in public health surveillance for the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games: an ecological study.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

This study examined Twitter for public health surveillance during a mass gathering in Canada with two objectives: to explore the feasibility of acquiring, categorizing and using geolocated Twitter data and to compare Twitter data against other data sources used for Pan Parapan American Games (P/PAG) surveillance.

Methods

Syndrome definitions were created using keyword categorization to extract posts from Twitter. Categories were developed iteratively for four relevant syndromes: respiratory, gastrointestinal, heat-related illness, and influenza-like illness (ILI). All data sources corresponded to the location of Toronto, Canada. Twitter data were acquired from a publicly available stream representing a 1% random sample of tweets from June 26 to September 10, 2015.

SUBMITTER: Khan Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6964588 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature