How Facebook Could Improve Your Health Risk
QHHL 
Jul 04 2019
0 
0 QHHL
If you’re on Facebook or other social media sites, you probably share personal information. And as time goes on, studies are showing that this information could help calculate your health risk more accurately.
Almost everyone’s on social media these days. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, or another platform, sharing online is probably a big part of your life. This has its benefits and its drawbacks. But one benefit you might not have considered has to do with your health. Studies are showing that your posts can be used to accurately predict your health risk factors. And it may also indicate specific diseases that you’re at risk of developing. So, here’s how your social media feeds impact your health.
Social media is a recent invention, but it’s growing rapidly. More than 3.499 billion people in the world today are active social media users. The average daily time spend on social media is 142 minutes a day. This is a staggering amount of activity. And it has implications for business, lifestyle, and for health. This trend looks to continue for the foreseeable future too. Between April 2018 and April 2019, social media users grew by 202 million. That means that there’s a new social media user every 6.4 seconds.
You generate information constantly through social media and other technology. This data carries lots of personal information that’s often used for marketing. However, there are other uses for this data, most notably in the health sector. Obviously, most of this information isn’t specifically related to your medical conditions. But health data can be extracted from even seemingly unrelated posts.
Health studies have been using posts on Facebook and other platforms for years. For example, what people say and how they say it can be used to analyze mental conditions. However, this isn’t the only way your posts can be used.
A recent study used Facebook and other social media posts to predict several medical conditions. This includes anxiety, diabetes, depression and psychosis. And the results were astounding. It showed that the information from your social media feed may be more accurate than demographic information. Demographic information includes your age, race, sex, background, profession, and income. It’s an important tool in disease prediction, but it isn’t as accurate as the language in your posts.
Some of the results were obvious. For example, the words ‘drink’ and ‘bottle’ were good predictors of alcohol abuse. But others were more intuitive. For example, people who used religious language were 15 times more likely to have diabetes than those who used it the least. This is a strange link, but a strong one. And it underlines the connection between language patterns and medical conditions.
There were some flaws in this study. It was too small, and the groups weren’t randomized adequately. But the results indicate the importance of future work in this area. And they also highlight an easy way for you to self-monitor and predict health risk factors.
If you use social media, you can use this tool in your self-monitoring at home. And this is fairly easy to do as well. Here’s how:
There’s an added bonus to adding this analysis to your health risk assessments. This type of information isn’t commonly used to assess health. That means that it’s a new avenue for assessing and understanding your health more completely.
If you’re concerned about a health risk, try using HomeLab to keep track of your condition and any preventative measures you take. And if you see signs of a significant problem, you should check with your doctor as soon as possible.
Tags: Health risk, Facebook, diabetes