SickCity Gives Real-time Disease Detection.
Last year Google unveiled the Google Flu Trend Tool which follows any increased flu-related search terms to determine where in the U.S. flu outbreaks may be occurring.
Well, now a creative computer programmer has put together an application that allows you to track the latest epidemic trends in your city via twitter (and soon facebook).
Called SickCity, it monitors twitter status messages in realtime, looking for keywords like “flu”, “chicken pox”, “fever”, etc. The information is then plotted on charts that show 30 day trends in each individual city. So far, only 10 cities are being followed:
New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, and Seattle.
Interesting idea…
(image from stock.xchng)
Hi, thanks for the mention! Regarding privacy concerns, Twitter is a public publishing platform, not a private one. It is similar to blogging, in that you are inviting everyone to see your tweets (unless you have made them private in which case no one can see them). Privacy should not really be an issue here.
As far as number of cities followed, we are well over 100 at this point – tune in and keep watching to see how the service evolves!