Realtime disease detection for your city from messages on Twitter. How does it work?
Do the number of conversations about sickness in your city reflect the current level of sickness there? Does conversation about sickness rise when sickness is rising, following roughly the same curve? Does it fall when sickness is falling?
We think it does.
And we think 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.
With that in mind, we give you SickCity, "realtime disease detection for your city", a tool that works by monitoring Twitter conversations for certain key phrases that indicate someone is sick in your area. When conversation about sickness in your area is up, that area is deemed "sicker" than when conversation is down.
Of course, this is all totally unproven at this point, so for now please view these pages as the experiment they are meant to be.
SickCity is an open source volunteer project created by DIYcity. If you can help make this tool for communities better, we would love your assistance.
flu, food poisoning, headcolds, chicken pox & sore throats