#SOCIALDATAGENIUS

What can tweets about apples, posts about rainbows, and check-ins at the Olive Garden reveal about the health of a community? A lot more, it turns out, than most academic researchers ever imagined – and Quynh Nguyen, Ph.D., assistant professor of health promotion and education, has come up with a way to harness this pervasive social data.

Working with a team of biomedical researchers, computer scientists, sociologists and statisticians, Nguyen has created a social data repository, HashtagHealth, to gather mentions of food, exercise and recreation from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. The repository even scans the social datasets for words that indicate happiness, like “laughter” and “music,” as well as words that point to despair, like “failed” and “arrested.” These social interactions are captured and organized by neighborhood, so that public health investigators can look at nuanced research questions, from how neighborhood crime rates affect obesity to whether community happiness has a contagion effect.

“Social media gives us a treasure trove of neighborhood data that we’ve never had access to before,” says Nguyen. “With HashtagHealth, we can use this information to tap into the pulse of the community immediately and make a real impact on population health.”