Active surveillance for influenza is a useful but costly endeavor. In recent years infoveillance tools have been developed to track and analyze data available on the Internet and social media (Eysenbach 2011). While infoveillance tools have been developed, few tools focus on geo-targeted data collection at a local level combined with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capability.
Objective
We developed geo-targeted social media application program interfaces (APIs) for Twitter and a web-based social media analytics and research testbed (SMART) dashboard to analyze “flu” related tweets. During the 2013-14 flu season, for 10 cities with active surveillance for influenza (ILI), we correlated weekly tweeting rates and visual patterns of flu tweeting rates. To facilitate widespread use and testing of this system, we developed an interactive webbased dashboard “SMART” that allows practitioners to monitor and visualize daily changes of flu trends and related flu news.