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SickCity : Using Twitter as a source of information

08.25.2009 · Posted in Articles, Medicine2.0

SickCity is a Realtime disease detection for your city – Using twitter to map the tweets about disease to the tweet geo address . The project is built for SickCity was built for the DIYCity Outbreak challenge.

SickCity watches Twitter (and soon Facebook) for any mentions of disease in a city. It then collects this information and presents it over time through graphs. SickCity is still quite new. Our algorithms are improving everyday and we are still getting in historical data for some cities.

The site creator describes how SickCity is using the twitter :

Measuring local conversations about being sick could be a valuable way to monitor the health of a community, maybe allowing us to foresee sudden rises in sickness locally — possibly even spot outbreaks before health organizations become aware of them.

sickcity.org

All countries are listed , When clinicking on a country there is sub-list for the cities  ,the user will be able to browser the tweets about disease in certain city , trying out the site i found some countries still missing some cities , for that the developer added a link ( Submit your city ) for vistors and users of the site .

Where is the search-box ?
what about providing a search box , for the countries , certain diseases or even cities . i believe it’ll make more usability for the users of the project .

Open source : The project is build on RubyOnRails framework and source code is available at github .

Personally i don’t think twitter is a good source with tweets ( conversations ) to get valuable data especially in this area , The developer assume the public will deal with the disease matters as crises matters, which may not happened considering official supervision and media control , in those types of events .

Another RealTime Health service : Healthmap.org which is reading the news from reliable , trusted and official news sources . which make the project is reliable because the data sources it depends on it .

About the author

Hamza Emadeen Mousa wrote 459 articles on this blog.

A Computer Geek self-thought , Free Styler designer and Developer . An open source Kid , a blogger who has been playing ( geeking ) around computers since the 90s . This kid happened to be a Doctor .

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