Towards a Disease Outbreak Notification Framework Using Twitter Mining for Smart Home Dashboards

Disease outbreaks are becoming a primary concern for many countries due to the recent cases of MERS, Ebola to name a few. Preventive measures can be taken into account when proper information about an outbreak is disseminated among the masses. Social media plays a crucial role during disease outbreaks. Saudi Arabia topped worldwide in terms of twitter usage. There are number of issues related to mining twitter for disease information including, filtering noisy information, establishing dictionary of terms to be used, sentiment analysis and establishing authenticity. In this project, we plan to develop a framework for mining and extracting information from twitter related to disease outbreaks. The system makes use of numerous programming interfaces as part of the framework to identify and notify the user of pertinent health related issues in a geographical area of interest. The framework is part of a smart home dashboard system that notifies the user about disease outbreak information. The smart home dashboard provides an effective human-home collaboration interface to the user.