Tweeting Fever: Can Twitter Be Used to Monitor the Incidence of Dengue-Like Illness in the Philippines?

The purpose of the pilot study described in this article was to investigate whether Twitter could be a viable data source for monitoring dengue-like illness in the Philippines. The results suggest that a relatively small but sufficient number of tweets mentioning dengue-like illness in a person can be isolated from data collected from the Twitter public application programming interface. More importantly, the temporal distribution of these dengue-like tweets was similar enough to the distribution of counts of new cases of dengue-like illness in the same region to suggest that the tweets could provide a valid data source for monitoring the temporal trend of dengue-like illness. Although it is not within the scope of the project described in this article, it would be relatively easy to operationalize the use of tweets collected from the Twitter public application programming interface as a timely, valid data source for an electronic disease surveillance system.