Doctors can now accurately predict when asthmatic patients will seek emergency room consultation through clues found in their social media posts, according to research by the Pediatric Academic Societies.

The study titled The Twitter Asthma Pulse: Using Real-Time Twitter Data to Prospectively Predict Asthma Emergency Department Visits or Hospital Admissions in a Population, accurately gathered social media posts between October 2013 and June 2014, which were then collated into 3,810 posts about asthma attacks that occurred in the Dallas-Fortworth area of Texas.

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In the same time frame, the ER visits by asthma patients were also recorded per region.

During the same period, the incidence of asthma-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations across the region area were recorded.

Yolande Mfondoum Pengetze, a Medical Director at the Parkland Center of Clinical Innovation, said that Twitter can alert health departments to anticipate an asthmatic patient's visit or hospital admission in the following days and help medics know when to intervene before the condition gets exacerbated

Sudha Ram, a co-author of the study, stated that is the era of Big Data. He added that the information gathered, when subject to analysis, will enable experts to study the pattern of human behavior.

Tagssocial media post, asthma, predict, er visits