Using social media data in diabetes care: Bridging the conceptual gap between health providers and patients (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ru-Hsueh Wang ◽  
Yu-Wen Hong ◽  
Chia-Chun Li ◽  
Siao-Ling Li ◽  
Jenn-Long Liu ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Diabetic patients with poor education about the disease may exhibit poor compliance and thus subsequently experience more complications. However, the conceptual gap between the diabetes education provided by health providers and the non-compliance of patients is still not well understood in the real world. OBJECTIVE Disclosing what people think about diabetes on social media may help to close this gap. METHODS In this study, social media data was collected from the OpView social media platform. After checking the quality of the data, we analyzed the trends in people’s discussions on the Internet using text mining. The natural language process, including word segmentation, and word count, and counting the relationships between the words. A word cloud is developed, and a clustering analyses are also performed. RESULTS There were 19,565 posts about diabetes collected from forums, community websites, and Q&A websites in 2017. The three most popular aspects of diabetes were diet (33.2%), life adjustment (21.2%), and avoiding complications (15.6%). Most of the discussions about diabetes were negative, and the top three negative ratios aspects were avoiding complications (7.60), problem-solving (4.08) and exercise (3.97). In terms of diet, the most popular topics were Chinese medicine and special diet therapy. In terms of life adjustment, financial issues, weight reduction, and a less painful glucometer were discussed the most. Furthermore, sexual dysfunction, neuropathy, nephropathy, and retinopathy were the most worrying issues in the avoiding complications area. Using text mining, we found that people care most about sexual dysfunction. Health providers care about the benefits of exercise in diabetes care, but people are mostly really concerned about sexual functioning. CONCLUSIONS A conceptual gap between health providers and diabetes patients existed in this real-world social media investigation. To spread healthy diabetic education concepts in the media, health providers might wish to provide more information related to patients actual areas of concern, such as sexual function, Chinese medicine, and weight reduction.

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Meehan ◽  
Tom Lunney ◽  
Kevin Curran ◽  
Aiden McCaughey

Purpose Manufacturers of smartphone devices are increasingly utilising a diverse range of sensors. This innovation has enabled developers to accurately determine a user’s current context. One area that has been significantly enhanced by the increased use of context in mobile applications is tourism. Traditionally, tour guide applications rely heavily on location and essentially ignore other types of context. This has led to problems of inappropriate suggestions and tourists experiencing information overload. These problems can be mitigated if appropriate personalisation and content filtering is performed. This research proposes an intelligent context-aware recommender system that aims to minimise the highlighted problems. Design/methodology/approach Intelligent reasoning was performed to determine the weight or importance of different types of environmental and temporal context. Environmental context such as the weather outside can have an impact on the suitability of tourist attractions. Temporal context can be the time of day or season; this is particularly important in tourism as it is largely a seasonal activity. Social context such as social media can potentially provide an indication of the “mood” of an attraction. These types of contexts are combined with location data and the context of the user to provide a more effective recommendation to tourists. The evaluation of the system is a user study that utilised both qualitative and quantitative methods, involving 40 participants of differing gender, age group, number of children and marital status. Findings This study revealed that the participants selected the context-based recommendation at a significantly higher level than either location-based recommendation or random recommendation. It was clear from analysing the questionnaire results that location is not the only influencing factor when deciding on a tourist attraction to visit. Research limitations/implications To effectively determine the success of the recommender system, various combinations of contextual conditions were simulated. Simulating contexts provided the ability to randomly assign different contextual conditions to ensure an effective recommendation under all circumstances. This is not a reflection of the “real world”, because in a “real world” field study the majority of the contextual conditions will be similar. For example, if a tourist visited numerous attractions in one day, then it is likely that the weather conditions would be the same for the majority of the day, especially in the summer season. Practical implications Utilising this type of recommender system would allow the tourists to “go their own way” rather than following a prescribed route. By using this system, tourists can co-create their own experience using both social media and mobile technology. This increases the need to retain user preferences and have it available for multiple destinations. The application will be able to learn further through multiple trips, and as a result, the personalisation aspect will be incrementally refined over time. This extensible aspect is increasingly important as personalisation is gradually more effective as more data is collated. Originality/value This paper contributes to the body of knowledge that currently exists regarding the study of utilising contextual conditions in mobile recommender systems. The novelty of the system proposed by this research is the combination of various types of temporal, environmental and personal context data to inform a recommendation in an extensible tourism application. Also, performing sentiment analysis on social media data has not previously been integrated into a tourist recommender system. The evaluation concludes that this research provides clear evidence for the benefits of combining social media data with environmental and temporal context to provide an effective recommendation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
Yuan Xue ◽  
Yilu Zhou

The study of national culture and cultural differences has immense value in today's business world. However, contemporary cross-cultural study instruments are subjective to many biases and intensive in terms of human labor. On the other hand, social media data offers tremendous opportunities for cross-cultural studies. However, it cannot be used directly as input for existing cross-cultural study applications in social science for being unstructured and noisy. In this work, the authors develop a text mining application called Social Media Associative Group Analysis (SMAGA). It effectively discovers information relevant to cultural values from social media data and represent such information using AGA verbal associations tuples. Experimental results show that the SMAGA framework can generate meaningful results in support of cross-cultural studies with much higher efficiency than traditional cross-cultural study instruments. This research underlines the emerging trend of developing text mining applications to automate cross-cultural and other types of social science studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (7) ◽  
pp. 921-935 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu He ◽  
Xin Tian ◽  
Ran Tao ◽  
Weidong Zhang ◽  
Gongjun Yan ◽  
...  

Purpose Online customer reviews could shed light into their experience, opinions, feelings, and concerns. To gain valuable knowledge about customers, it becomes increasingly important for businesses to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize, and visualize online customer reviews posted on social media platforms such as online forums. However, analyzing social media data is challenging due to the vast increase of social media data. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach of using natural language preprocessing, text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze online customer reviews related to various hotels through a case study. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a tested approach of using natural language preprocessing, text mining, and sentiment analysis techniques to analyze online textual content. The value of the proposed approach was demonstrated through a case study using online hotel reviews. Findings The study found that the overall review star rating correlates pretty well with the sentiment scores for both the title and the full content of the online customer review. The case study also revealed that both extremely satisfied and extremely dissatisfied hotel customers share a common interest in the five categories: food, location, rooms, service, and staff. Originality/value This study analyzed the online reviews from English-speaking hotel customers in China to understand their preferred hotel attributes, main concerns or demands. This study also provides a feasible approach and a case study as an example to help enterprises more effectively apply social media analytics in practice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Karami ◽  
London S. Bennett ◽  
Xiaoyun He

Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years, social media such as Twitter has enabled people to share their opinions regarding elections. Social media has provided a platform for collecting a large amount of social media data. This article proposes a computational public opinion mining approach to explore the discussion of economic issues in social media during an election. Current related studies use text mining methods independently for election analysis and election prediction; this research combines two text mining methods: sentiment analysis and topic modeling. The proposed approach has effectively been deployed on millions of tweets to analyze economic concerns of people during the 2012 US presidential election.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Tian ◽  
Wu He ◽  
Chuanyi Tang ◽  
Ling Li ◽  
Hangjun Xu ◽  
...  

Purpose Research on how to use social media data to measure and evaluate service quality is still limited. To fill the research gap in the literature, the purpose of this paper is to open a new avenue for future work to measure the service quality in the service industry by developing a new analytical approach of using social media analytics to evaluate service quality. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses social media data to measure the service quality of the airline industry with the SERVQUAL metrics. A novel benchmark data set was created for each SERVQUAL metric. The data set was analyzed through text mining and sentiment analysis. Findings By comparing the results from social media with official service quality report from the Department of Transportation, the authors found that the proposed service quality metrics from social media are valid and can be used to estimate the service quality. Practical implications This paper presents service quality metrics and a methodology that can be easily adopted by other businesses to assess service quality. This study also provides guidance and suggestions to help businesses understand how to collect and analyze social media data for the purpose of evaluating service quality. Originality/value This paper offers a novel methodology that uses text mining and sentiment analysis to help the airline industry assess its service quality.


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