Social MediomeFacebook, Instagram, and Twitter have more than 2 billion users worldwide.
From posting a status about plans or how they’re feeling to sharing a photo or a check-in – everyday users leave a trail of information in the form of digital footprints.
At the Center for Digital Health, we’ve set out to explore what we can learn about a person’s health by following their digital footprints.
Similar to how a genome - a collection of an organism’s genetic information - can inform potential risk factors for developing a certain health condition or disease, we believe that an individual’s Social Mediome can elucidate important insights, like behaviors and repeated exposures that over time can have an impact on a person’s health status.
To date, more than 6,000 contributors have consented to join the Social Mediome community – sharing more than 60 million data points with our team.
Currently, our team of experts is conducting natural language analyses to map correlations and identify trends. We believe that understanding such relationships can potentially help us determine new ways to predict, measure and intervene in multiple disease profiles such as diabetes, heart disease and mental health in the future.
Ultimately, our goal is to provide both patients and doctors with a deeper understanding of how one’s social media activity can be used as a diagnostic and descriptive tool.
