Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Poster
Presentation #1 Title
Digital Disease Surveillance in Rural Appalachia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Disease surveillance is integral to public health efforts, allowing not only the detection of outbreaks, but also the evaluation of previous interventions. Such efforts are difficult and occasionally overlooked in rural and disenfranchised regions such as Appalachia. Traditional surveillance techniques involve collecting data from hospitals, pharmacies, and physicians’ offices, but this is changing in the 21st century. Social media has penetrated even the most economically disadvantaged areas, and surprisingly, people are happy to publicize their ailments. Perhaps even stranger, many of these individuals willingly include their location. Responding to the need and data availability, we have deployed ChatterGrabber, a tool with which public health professionals can survey local Twitter data. After being given keywords, ChatterGrabber automatically pulls all public, geolocated Twitter tweets within a given geographic area. Through the use of natural language processing, it then identifies tweets of significance. This data is anonymized to protect the identities of users and then passed on to the Health Department which can use them for time-series and hot spot analyses. We would like to note that we only pull data from users who explicitly set their twitter feeds to "public". We will present two case studies outlining the use of this tool in rural Southwest Virginia. The first focuses on identifying tick-bites, the second on gastrointestinal illness. We feel this effort greatly augments the efficacy of disease surveillance in underserved areas.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
James Schlitt is a student at Virginia Tech, simultaneously pursuing a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and a Masters of Public Health in Infectious Diseases. His research is split between digital disease surveillance efforts, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Dr. Bryan Lewis is a research Associate Professor with the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech. With a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, his research is primarily focused on computational modeling of infectious diseases and network epidemiology.
Digital Disease Surveillance in Rural Appalachia
Disease surveillance is integral to public health efforts, allowing not only the detection of outbreaks, but also the evaluation of previous interventions. Such efforts are difficult and occasionally overlooked in rural and disenfranchised regions such as Appalachia. Traditional surveillance techniques involve collecting data from hospitals, pharmacies, and physicians’ offices, but this is changing in the 21st century. Social media has penetrated even the most economically disadvantaged areas, and surprisingly, people are happy to publicize their ailments. Perhaps even stranger, many of these individuals willingly include their location. Responding to the need and data availability, we have deployed ChatterGrabber, a tool with which public health professionals can survey local Twitter data. After being given keywords, ChatterGrabber automatically pulls all public, geolocated Twitter tweets within a given geographic area. Through the use of natural language processing, it then identifies tweets of significance. This data is anonymized to protect the identities of users and then passed on to the Health Department which can use them for time-series and hot spot analyses. We would like to note that we only pull data from users who explicitly set their twitter feeds to "public". We will present two case studies outlining the use of this tool in rural Southwest Virginia. The first focuses on identifying tick-bites, the second on gastrointestinal illness. We feel this effort greatly augments the efficacy of disease surveillance in underserved areas.
