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#hayfever; A Longitudinal Study into Hay Fever Related Tweets in the UK

de Quincey, Ed; Kyriacou, Theocharis; Pantin, Thomas

#hayfever; A Longitudinal Study into Hay Fever Related Tweets in the UK Thumbnail


Authors

Thomas Pantin



Abstract

This paper describes a longitudinal study that has collected and analysed over 512,000 UK geolocated tweets over 2 years from June 2012 that contained instances of the words "hayfever" and "hay fever". The results indicate that the temporal distribution of the tweets collected in 2014 correlates strongly (r=0.97, p<0.01) with incidents of hay fever reported by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in the same year. An analysis of the content of the tweets indicates that users are self-reporting common, often severe symptoms as well as the uses of medication. We conclude that hay fever related tweets provide a real-time, free and easily accessible source of data at a finer level of granularity than currently available data sets. The implications for researchers, health professionals and sufferers are also discussed.

Conference Name 6th International Conference on Digital Health
Conference Location Montreal
Start Date Apr 11, 2016
End Date Apr 13, 2016
Acceptance Date Feb 18, 2016
Online Publication Date Apr 11, 2016
Publication Date Feb 18, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Series Title 6th International Conference on Digital Health Conference
ISBN 9781450342247
DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/2896338.2896342
Keywords Hay fever, Hayfever, allergic rhinitis, Social Media, twitter
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2896338.2896342

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