Twitter Health and Sentinal Citizens

Twitter Health is an application, or, more importantly, an approach, that empowers the sentinel citizen.  From the perspective of public health, this approach provides an opt-in methodology to track specific chronic health patterns.

Initially developed on the Apple iPhone, it’s a prototype for personalized health, with a twist.  The application includes an interface to send 140-character messages to the Twitter infrastructure, as every other Twitter application; however, it also includes an analytics engine that provides a closed feedback loop for the tweeted messages. The closed feedback loop provides graphical time-series analysis of specific personal health concerns.

The Twitter Health application may be configured to handle multiple chronic public health concerns, some which are spelled out in the following chart:

Question Answered by Tweet	Public Health Concern	Health Measure
What do I weigh today?	Obesity	Daily weight
How do I feel right now?	Mental Health	Emotional state (i.e., sad)
How often do I smoke cigarettes?	Smoking	Number of cigarettes smoked per day
What is my glucose level?	Diabetes	Glucose level

Twitter Health provides a model for developing new and innovative public health capacity by leveraging existing social network infrastructure and the large concomitant groups of people trafficking in this virtual space.  This model has the potential lower historical boundaries between public health and the individual.

The Twitter Health application includes an opt-in feature that enables the application to provide health tweets to public health for surveillance or to receive from CDC or state public health departments helpful information based on the trends associated with their health tweet history relative to the chronic condition they are tracking.

Informing the PHIN community about this approach may spark new ideas and opportunities for innovation and the improvement of public health.