Researchers analyze social media as a disease-monitoring tool

A project coordinated by Children's Hospital Boston researchers found that social-networking tools, in conjunction with the use of personal health records, could be valuable in the monitoring of a chronic disease.

Dr. Kenneth Mandl, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program's Intelligent Health Laboratory, and Elissa Weitzman, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and of adolescent medicine at the hospital, were co-principal investigators for the project. Members of a social website run by a not-for-profit foundation for diabetes patients were invited to publicly or anonymously share their personal data regarding one common diabetes-control measure. Data was submitted using an application based on the C.H.I.P.'s personally controlled health record; it was then displayed on state- or country-level maps in real time, according to the release. One in five users of the social website signed up for the application, and 81% of the application's users shared their data, the researchers noted.