There is a growing appreciation for the insights our social media postings can provide as to both our own lives and the workings of society.

A recent study suggests that what we share on Facebook and Twitter, and the language we use when doing so, can provide a telling glimpse into our general health and wellbeing.

“We don’t often think of our social media content as data, but the language we use and the information we post may offer valuable insights into the relationship between our everyday lives and our health,” the authors say. “Finding ways to effectively harness and mine that data could prove to be a valuable source of information about how and why patients communicate about their health. There is a rich potential to identify health trends both in the general public and at the individual level, create education campaigns and interventions, and much more. One of the unique aspects of this data is the ability to link social media data with validated information from a health record.”

A social media data bank

The study required patients who were visiting an emergency department to share their social media habits, including the content they posted, as well as their medical data.  The aim was to produce a database as rich as existing banks of genomic data.

Over 1,000 people agreed to provide such data over a seven month period, with content available as far back as 2009.  This consisted of around 1.4 million posts and tweets.

“The social media and health data bank, which we are continuing to build, serves a valuable purpose in helping us think about health in new ways, some of which we haven’t even begun to consider,” the authors say. “Just as genetic information is banked to track potential future health, previously unobservable social media postings — made up of words, language, and conversations — may also be banked from consenting individuals and evaluated for potential correlations with health and health outcomes.”

The data revealed some specific insights, such as forgetting to take medicine on a particular day, whilst others were more subtle, such as pictures of unhealthy food.

The researchers believe that analysis of such data can reveal a range of things, from adherence to medicine plans through to exercise and diet and even things such as cognitive function or onset of depression.

“These findings suggests that social media is a promising avenue for exploring how patients conceptualize and communicate about their specific health issues,” the researchers say. “We see this as just the first of many studies to come examining the relationship between health and social media.”

Suffice to say, to roll this out on a larger scale would require significant attention given to patient confidentiality, but it does nonetheless provide a glimpse into the kind of insights that can be gleaned from what we post online.