There have probably been times when just a cursory glance at your Facebook feed or Twitter stream reminds you that it’s flu season and plenty of your friends’ status updates referred to some sort of sneezy, snuffly, achy, barfy condition. Thanks to mobile technology, that’s something you can still do while sick in bed: post to your various social networks.
For the healthy among us, these sorts of status updates serve as a good reminder of who we should steer clear of. But at a larger scale, this social data can give other warnings about where diseases clusters are occurring. And unlike the sorts of statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, this social data can be tracked in real-time.
That’s the aim of a new startup called Sickweather. The company, which is still in private beta, wants to track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.
Article source: RRW http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/cYmx832GbOE/sickweather_analyzes_social_data_to_map_illness_ou.php