Investigating Public Health Surveillance using Twitter

Microblog services such as Twitter are an attractive source of data for public health surveillance, as they avoid the legal and technical obstacles to accessing the more obvious and targeted sources of health information. Only a tiny fraction of tweets may contain useful public health information but in Twitter this is oset by the sheer volume of tweets posted. We present a system which can identify medical named entities in a real-time stream of Twitter posts and determine their geographic locations, as well as preliminary experiments in using this information for health surveillance purposes.