Real time public health data capture using Big Data and social media are now at the forefront of behavioral measurement, disease surveillance, and health promotion in many public health research activities. Public health research community is now rapidly reexamining the role of dynamic environmental-behavioral interactions and how both elements of this interaction can be modified to promote optimal health in the areas of obesity, cancer, HIV, influenza, alcohol and drug misuse research.There is a great opportunity for geographers and GIS specialists to collaborate with public health researchers and practitioners to develop comprehensive research framework, web maps, and visualization tools to promote health behaviors, detect disease outbreaks, and prevent health problems.
This webinar will discuss the impacts of big data and social media to disease outbreak surveillance and health disparities problems. Several web applications developed by the Center of Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) (http://humandynamics.sdsu.edu/research.html(link is external)) at San Diego State University will be introduced to demonstrate the value of social media analytics, including SMART dashboard for city-level flu outbreak monitoring tasks and GeoViewer for studying environmental-behavioral interactions