Social media data have been increasingly used to study biomedical and health-related phenomena. From cohort-level discussions of a condition to population-level analyses of sentiment, social media have provided scientists with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analysis has shown the most progress, including pharmacovigilance and sentiment analysis, especially for mental health. We also discuss a variety of innovative uses of social media data for health-related applications as well as important limitations of social media data access and use.
more »
« less
SEM Approach for TPB: Application to Digital Health Software and Self-Health Management
The goal of this research is to investigate the feasibility of Structure Equation Modeling approach for developing a quantitative behavior model grounded on the Theory of Planned Behavior. Data collected from an IRB sanctioned pilot consisting of approximately 500 participants were used to develop the model. The validity of the model is evaluated based on Chi-square, p-value, and RMSEA for statistical power and goodness of fit. The utility of the model is studied through correlation analysis related to user engagement for self-health management. Example association pattern discovered from the analysis was illustrated for its use in digital health software development.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1648780
- PAR ID:
- 10048039
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 4th Annual Conf. on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence (CSCI'17); Dec 14-16, 2017; Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 529-535
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In this mini-review, we discuss the fundamentals of using technology in mental health diagnosis and tracking. We highlight those principles using two clinical concepts: (1) cravings and relapse in the context of addictive disorders and (2) anhedonia in the context of depression. This manuscript is useful for both clinicians wanting to understand the scope of technology use in psychiatry and for computer scientists and engineers wishing to assess psychiatric frameworks useful for diagnosis and treatment. The increase in smartphone ownership and internet connectivity, as well as the accelerated development of wearable devices, have made the observation and analysis of human behavior patterns possible. This has, in turn, paved the way to understand mental health conditions better. These technologies have immense potential in facilitating the diagnosis and tracking of mental health conditions; they also allow the implementation of existing behavioral treatments in new contexts (e.g., remotely, online, and in rural/underserved areas), and the possibility to develop new treatments based on new understanding of behavior patterns. The path to understand how to best use technology in mental health includes the need to match interdisciplinary frameworks from engineering/computer sciences and psychiatry. Thus, we start our review by introducing bio-behavioral sensing, the types of information available, and what behavioral patterns they may reflect and be related to in psychiatric diagnostic frameworks. This information is linked to the use of functional imaging, highlighting how imaging modalities can be considered “ground truth” for mental health/psychiatric dimensions, given the heterogeneity of clinical presentations, and the difficulty of determining what symptom corresponds to what disease. We then discuss how mental health/psychiatric dimensions overlap, yet differ from, psychiatric diagnoses. Using two clinical examples, we highlight the potential agreement areas in assessment/management of anhedonia and cravings. These two dimensions were chosen because of their link to two very prevalent diseases worldwide: depression and addiction. Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression, which is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Cravings, the urge to use a substance or perform an action (e.g., shopping, internet), is the leading step before relapse. Lastly, through the manuscript, we discuss potential mental health dimensions.more » « less
-
This paper explores the feasibility of using sonification in delivering and communicating health and wellness status on personal devices. Ambient displays have proven to inform users of their health and wellness and help them to make healthier decisions, yet, little technology provides health assessments through sounds, which can be even more pervasive than visual displays. We developed a method to generate music from user preferences and evaluated it in a two-step user study. In the first step, we acquired general healthiness impressions from each user. In the second step, we generated customized melodies from music preferences in the first step to capture participants' perceived healthiness of those melodies. We deployed our surveys for 55 participants to complete on their own over 31 days. We analyzed the data to understand commonalities and differences in users' perceptions of music as an expression of health. Our findings show the existence of clear associations between perceived healthiness and different music features. We provide useful insights into how different musical features impact the perceived healthiness of music, how perceptions of healthiness vary between users, what trends exist between users' impressions, and what influences (or does not influence) a user's perception of healthiness in a melody. Overall, our results indicate validity in presenting health data through personalized music models. The findings can inform the design of behavior management applications on personal and ubiquitous devices.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Can health conditions be inferred from an individual's mobility pattern? Existing research has discussed the relationship between individual physical activity/mobility and well-being, yet no systematic study has been done to investigate the predictability of fine-grained health conditions from mobility, largely due to the unavailability of data and unsatisfactory modelling techniques. Here, we present a large-scale longitudinal study, where we collect the health conditions of 747 individuals who visit a hospital and tracked their mobility for 2 months in Beijing, China. To facilitate fine-grained individual health condition sensing, we propose HealthWalks, an interpretable machine learning model that takes user location traces, the associated points of interest, and user social demographics as input, at the core of which a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) model is proposed to auto-generate explainable features to capture useful signals. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, which achieves 40.29% in micro-F1 and 31.63% in Macro-F1 for the 8-class disease category prediction, and outperforms the best baseline by 22.84% in Micro-F1 and 31.79% in Macro-F1. In addition, deeper analysis based on the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) showcases that HealthWalks can derive meaningful insights with regard to the correlation between mobility and health conditions, which provide important research insights and design implications for mobile sensing and health informatics.more » « less
-
There has been an alarming increase in the prevalence of mental health concerns amongst undergraduate students. Engineering students experiencing mental health distress are less likely to seek professional help than are non-engineering students. Lack of treatment can result in the escalation of mental health symptoms among engineering students. This study, supported by an NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formation grant, focused on characterizing engineering students’ beliefs about seeking help for a mental health concern. Using the integrated behavioral model as a framework, 33 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with engineering students from a wide range of majors, years of study, and social identity groups. Interviews were analyzed through deductive coding to identify key beliefs associated with help-seeking as defined by the integrated behavioral model. The beliefs identified include a desire among engineering students to fix their own problems, to avoid admitting imperfection, and fear of being seen by others when seeking help for a mental health concern. These results were used to create an engineering mental health help-seeking instrument containing items related to perceived outcomes/attributes, experiential (i.e., affective) beliefs, barriers/facilitators, and perceived norms associated with help seeking. This instrument is currently being refined through cognitive interviews, and pilot data will be collected to examine evidence of instrument reliability and validity. The finalized instrument will be used to identify those beliefs that are predictive of help-seeking intention and behavior. These beliefs are prime targets for future interventions designed to increase mental health help-seeking in the undergraduate engineering student population.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

