Elaine Nsoesie, PhD, is a research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital’s HealthMap, Harvard Medical School and Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. In this post, which originally appeared on HealthMap’s Disease Daily, Nsoesie looks at the trend of detecting disease digitally by monitoring mentions on social media. She delves into one of the major limitations of this technique—namely telling those who are curious about a disease apart from those who actually have it.

There are plenty of studies about tracking diseases (such as influenza) using digital data sources, which is awesome! However, many of these studies focus solely on matching the trends in the digital data sources (for example, searches on disease-related terms, or how frequently certain disease-related terms are mentioned on social media over time, etc.) to data from official sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although this approach is useful in telling us about the possible utility of these data, there are several limitations. One of the main limitations is the difficulty in distinguishing between data generated by healthy individuals and individuals who are actually sick. In other words, how can we tell whether someone who searches Google or Wikipedia for influenza is sick or just curious about the flu?

Researchers at Penn State University have developed a system that seeks to deal with this limitation. We spoke to the lead author, Todd Bodnar, about the study titled, On the Ground Validation of Online Diagnosis with Twitter and Medical Records. …