New Research Uses Search Data To Understand Public Health Needs

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Online searches may reveal information about how we think about health and disease. Researchers are finding ways to use this data to improve public health in Africa.

of further spreading infection. Effective medical care depends on openness, honesty, acceptance, a lack of judgment, and good information. However, public health interventions are not one size fits all; they must take into account the cultural context of the people in need of care.

Abebe began this research and did much of the technical analysis during an internship at Microsoft Research. Using proprietary data provided by Microsoft’s search engine Bing, the project turned into what she called “the first work to use large Web- or social media-based data to study health in all 54 nations in Africa.”

Given the lack of computationally-driven work on mapping health information needs of individuals in African nations, we settled on asking whether we can shed more light on the varied and unmet health information needs of individuals in Africa and how those needs are being met online. Topics related to concerns about transmission to partner and child are more popular among the 25–34 age group.

The main thing I hope to avoid is to see these as a replacement of surveys and more traditional methods or to see this as a panacea.The team also assessed the quality of search results on HIV/AIDS to get a sense of what people ended up reading while doing online research. To do this, they looked at which webpages users clicked on, how much time they spent on a page, and how much time they spent looking at the results page.

But one might argue that if the information exists in the first place - and if it can truly help people - it should be put to use. If research such as this can help improve education campaigns and bring better health care to regions where it’s lacking, is it irresponsible to let the data be used only for internal product research and marketing and not to improve health?

 

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