Social media monitoring: The Dengue e-Monitor

Abstract

The aim of the article is to discuss the preliminary results of the research “Information monitoring on neglected diseases: the Dengue e-Monitor”. The Dengue e-Monitor is an information monitoring system on the Internet. Monitoring is achieved through robot mechanisms, softwares or intelligent agents that search for websites about dengue available on the Internet. Results of previous studies have indicated new perspectives for information monitoring mainly through social media. Among social media, Twitter is considered to play a key role in information management by allowing the identification of users who may act as filters of information, thus enabling direct access to the most relevant information in a particular area of interest. Therefore, by monitoring Twitter, the first question to be answered was “Who talks about dengue?”. Initially, it was possible to identify the relationship between the actors/profiles located in the city of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói with the highest occurrence of the word “dengue” in their posts. The profiles were then registered in the monitoring system and are constantly monitored. The second question to be answered was “When is dengue mentioned?” With this monitoring system, we expect to gain a better understanding of how social media can be used to strengthen the relationship between science and society. It was found that the number of twetts accompanied  the growth in the number of dengue cases. Indications are that there is a relationship between rumors about dengue and the increase in the number of cases reported.