Researchers use Twitter to gauge health-influencing factors

Researchers at the University of Rochester have used Twitter to model how factors such as social status, exposure to pollution, interpersonal interaction and more influence one's health. "If you want to know, down to the individual level, how many people are sick in a population, you would have to survey the population, which is costly and time-consuming," Adam Sadilek, researcher at the University of Rochester, said in an announcement from the university. "Twitter and the technology we have developed allow us to do this passively, quickly and inexpensively; we can listen in to what people are saying and mine this data to make predictions."

Geo-tagged tweets allow researches to map out where, what and when people tweeted, then allow them to analyze interactions between users and their environment. Announcement