slightlymoving

more on monitoring

so a quick, and non-exhaustive, search didn’t find much in the area of monitoring social media status feeds for changes in mood/behavior. there has been quite a lot published on social media and health though.

further to my initial idea i’ve mused a bit more. read on.

It seems there’s not much research out there in terms of mental state and correlations with social media updates (content and/or tone). 

A possible system for monitoring status updates would need to be ‘trained’ to each individual. It would require time to build a personalised mood dictionary that could then be used to monitor status updates in real time to provide feedback to the person (and/or their authorized mental health professional). This feedback could be graded information based on frequency of updates, mood parameters (as defined in the dictionary), durational information, and perhaps risk signals (for prioritizing interventional management). An analogous analogue system is the asthma action plans, where, based on peak flow readings and subjective symptoms there is a graded response for the person to follow with each intervention escalating in terms of medication and health professional involvement.

It would, of course, require the person to setup in consultation with a health professional and would need to have a discussion about confidentiality. For example, if there was a program that could monitor tweets in this way, what would stop someone else from monitoring a third-party? Being an official app you could limit input through oauth - but given unprotected tweets are public it would be possible to grab them an analyze them anyway. But to what end? I guess employers could monitor an employees mental state, which is ethically problematic.  In terms of mental health, this could be extensible to people on Community Treatment Orders, monitoring their digital stream (including text messages, twitter, fb) for signs of deteriorating mental state and allowing early intervention. This is also an ethically difficult area, but I think there is some potential for this idea in improving the mental health of many people.

Anyone interested in looking into this further?

monitoring

while riding to work i was musing on twitter and mental health.

i’ll have to go and search to see if it already exists, but i was thinking about the possibilities for people with bipolar or mood/affective diagnoses in terms of monitoring twitter streams. i was thinking that moving into a more manic phase may show more frequent tweets with any of the various elements of being in such a state appearing in content - as a monitoring tool this could be used to trigger earlier interventions to help people manage their condition. could probably even be an automated process to some degree.

will have a search and see what comes up.