Social media and big data: Can Tweet moods predict illness and hospital/doc visits in a region?

Background:Depression has been associated with increased morbidity and mortality from illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. It is also associated with adverse health habits such as smoking, over-eating, sedentary lifestyle, which in turn lead to obesity and other health issues. Thus, it is quite evident from prior studies that mood disorders can predict physical illnesses to some extent. There have been some studies that have tried to glean moods and even depression from tweets; however, these studies did not connect them to disease or illness or to hospital/doc visits. 

Objective: The objective of this research is to analyze tweets regarding depression – characterized by sadness, feelings of loneliness, gloominess and other characteristics associated with depression, such as lack of concentration, suicidal thoughts, dejection etc., to see if those tweets predict illnesses and consequently lead to hospital/doc visits. 

Method: We developed a semantic lexicon to capture user vocabularies and phrases that can characterize depression and moods. We draw from sentiment analysis literature and also use vocabulary that is ‘trending’ in tweets regarding moods. Next, we evaluate approximately 200 million tweets and use a software program to assign a depression score – ‘highly depressed’ to ‘not at all depressed’. Finally, statistical association analysis (e.g., Apriori) will be used to connect the depression tweets with disease/ illness tweets or doc/hospital visit tweets. 

Results: The study findings are expected to hold important implications for how we can use big data from social media to predict disease outcomes and healthcare service utilization. This can be used to predict whether there are regional or seasonal differences in moods and whether those differences impact disease outcomes. This study is the first of its kind and holds potential to unveil critical social and clinical factors related to depression, which in turn has considerable implications for public health.