Facebook Can Let Doctors Know More About Your Mental And Physical Conditions

Arnav Dhar - Jun 24, 2019


Facebook Can Let Doctors Know More About Your Mental And Physical Conditions

Facebook posts can tell more about you than you've ever known. Researchers found that it can predict your diseases by using collected data.

Facebook is often considered as something "unhealthy" because of several scandals around the clock with a lot of concerns on how it negatively affects people's mental health. However, the world's most popular social network has already shown a surprisingly positive effect, which was cited in an article published on PLOS One a few days ago.

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Facebook now has more than 1.5 billion daily active users.

In the research jointly conducted by Stony Brook University and Penn Medicine, it is shown that people's mental health issues and other physical problems can be diagnosed by watching their social media's posts. According to the researchers, people who use more words like "drink" or "bottle" were more likely to be alcoholic. While this sign is fairly predictable, they also noticed that those who liked using words such as "God" or "pray" were 15 times more related to diabetes than people who used these words less often.

As per the research, information gathered from Facebook posts is significantly more useful than demographic information alone for some medical issues. Yet, the result from both sources still yielded more accuracy than each of them alone.

As a quote by research group leader Dr. Raina Merchant:

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However, he still confirmed that the research was still in the early stage.

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Can doctors use your online data for medical diagnosis?

Dr. Merchant's state further reinforces the significance of our social media posts. With people spending more and more time for social networks, it's likely that they can expose their lifestyle and feelings far more than they could ever notice.

For the method, they used an automated technique to gather information and analyze from approx. 1,000 patients who use Facebook and consented to link their profiles with their electronic health records. They also analyze the results from Facebook posts, from demographics, and from both separately for clear comparisons.

Earlier, we have known that Facebook can use AI to identify suicide risks of users.

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