Socia Media and Healthcare Technology

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https://hdl.handle.net/10125/72208

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Identifying Vaccine Hesitant Communities on Twitter and their Geolocations: A Network Approach
    ( 2021-01-05) Ruiz, Jeanette ; Featherstone , Jade D. ; Barnett, George A.
    Vaccine misinformation online may contribute to the increase of anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine-hesitant behaviors. Social network data was used to identify Twitter vaccine influencers, their online twitter communities, and their geolocations to determine pro-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant online communities. We explored 139,433 tweets and identified 420 vaccine Twitter influencers—opinion leaders and assessed 13,487 of their tweets and 7,731 of their connections. Semantic network analysis was employed to determine twitter conversation themes. Results suggest that locating social media influencers is an efficient way to identify and target vaccine-hesitant communities online. We discuss the implications of using this process for public health education and disease management.
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    From Digital Community Engagement to Smoking Cessation: Insights from the Reddit r/StopSmoking Thread
    ( 2021-01-05) De Santo, Alessio ; Moro, Arielle ; Kocher, Bruno ; Holzer, Adrian
    Despite decades of prevention, tobacco addiction is still a widespread health concern responsible for around 8 million deaths per year. Existing digital solutions such as social media are becoming increasingly popular and represent a novel approach for people to find community support. However, little is known about how they affect smoking behavior. This paper tackles this issue by investigating attitudes, motivations and behaviors of 169 users of one such digital community, namely the Reddit r/StopSmoking thread. We present a model based on the transtheoretical model as well as the uses and gratification approach that investigates the support of digital communities in the smoking cessation process. Our findings suggest that engagement in online smoking cessation communities has a positive link to smokers' behavior in their process of change. Providing help, seeking help, seeking information, seeking status and seeking entertainment being identified as motivational factors to engage in such online communities.
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    Blowing the Whistle on Opioid Overprescription: Insights from Patient Feedback on Physician Rating Websites
    ( 2021-01-05) Mamonov, Stanislav
    Overprescription of opioid pain relievers is a known contributor to the growing opioid epidemic. Identification of medical practices that engage in overprescription has proven challenging. We examine the utility of physician rating websites (PRWs) as potential sources of data that may help identify overprescribing practices. We leverage text mining techniques to identify linguistic cues that are associated with known cases of overprescription. We find that patients flag potentially problematic medical practices in their reviews and suggest that intervention by authorities is warranted. Our study contributes to the growing body of literature on medical infoveillance by identifying patients’ appeals to regulatory authorities as an important type of social signal for regulatory monitoring.
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    Adverse Health Effects of Kratom: An Analysis of Social Media Data
    ( 2021-01-05) Wahbeh, Abdullah ; Nasralah, Tareq ; El-Gayar, Omar ; Al-Ramahi, Mohammad ; Elnoshokaty, Ahmed
    This study investigates the adverse healthcare effects associated with the use of kratom. Using machine learning techniques, we analyzed a total of 36,516 users’ posts related to kratom. The results and analysis showed that social media could help identify important insights related to the use of kratom. The sentiment and emotion analyses showed that the kratom experience was negative and largely associated with anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. The results from topic modeling showed that kratom is associated with a number of healthcare issues such as rashes and itching, urination, constipation, loss of appetite/weight, dry mouth, seizures, nausea, heartburn, dehydration, hot flashes, and loss of libido. The results indicated that 26% of users’ posts discussed multiple kratom side effects. Also, results showed the prevalence and dominance of loss of libido followed by heartburn, dry mouth, dehydration, and constipation.
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