Allergy, cold and flu seasons are upon us, and an innovative way to stay healthy is to use Sickweather, a new online network that screens health-related status updates on social media and posts illness trends to a map detailed down to the street level. The service scans sites like Twitter and Facebook for 24 different symptoms using an algorithm to detect disease outbreaks. (Luckily, it can weed out outbreaks of “Bieber fever” among the pop star’s fans.) Although HIV isn’t currently tracked, as people become more open in their online lives a tool like this could help reveal more accurate numbers of those infected worldwide.
Digital Disease Detector
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