Analysing Relevant Diseases from Iberian Tweets

The Internet constitutes a huge source of information that can be exploited by individuals in many different ways. With the increasing use of social networks and blogs, the Internet is now used not only as an information source but also to disseminate personal health information. In this paper we exploit the wealth of user-generated data, available through the micro-blogging service Twitter, to estimate and track the incidence of health conditions in society, specifically in Portugal and Spain. We present results for the acquisition of relevant tweets for a set of four different conditions (flu, depression, pregnancy and eating disorders) and for the binary classification of these tweets as relevant or not for each case. The results obtained, ranging in AUC from 0.7 to 0.87, are very promising and indicate that such approach provides a feasible solution for measuring and tracking the evolution of many health related aspects within the society.