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The Migraine Radar - A Medical Study Analyzing Twitter Messages?

Authors:
Dirk Reinel
Sven Rill
Jörg Scheidt
Florian Wogenstein

Keywords: migraine; trigger; Twitter; weather; text mining

Abstract:
This paper discusses the work in progress of the ”Migraine Radar” project. The purpose of the project is to validate or disprove the assumed correlation between migraine attacks and weather conditions, especially weather changes. There have been various medical studies on this topic, but the correlation could not be proved with sufficient statistical significance so far. Furthermore, the results of some of the studies are contradictory. For this study, data from the microblogging platform Twitter will be analyzed. Twitter messages (”tweets”) announcing currently or recently happened migraine attacks are retrieved using the Twitter API (Search-API, REST-API - Standard APIs provided by Twitter to retrieve tweet and user data). Weather data from weather information services are linked to the tweets, using the location information from Twitter. For the German language area, the results will be compared with the results obtained from a set of migraine announcements collected with the help of a web form in the same period of time. First statistics indicate that the number of migraine attacks announced in Twitter exceeds the number of cases in former classical studies by far. The project offers a wide range of possibilities to analyze Twitter messages with regard to migraine attacks. Beside the main purpose, it is also possible to analyze the distribution of migraine attacks over the weekdays or over the seasons. Furthermore an investigation of the spatial distribution of migraine attacks is possible. Instead of weather data, other information can be linked to the migraine sample as well. One example could be air pollution data.

Pages: 103 to 106

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: October 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9332

ISBN: 978-1-61208-162-5

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 23, 2011 to October 29, 2011