Top health trends: An information visualization tool for awareness of local health trends

We developed an intelligent information visualization tool to enable public health officials to detect healthrelated trends in any geographic area of interest, based on Twitter data. Monitoring emergent events such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and terrorism is vital for protecting public health. Our goal is to support situation awareness (SA) for personnel responsible for early detection and response to public health threats. To achieve this goal, our application identifies the most frequently tweeted illnesses in a ranked chart and map for a selected geographic area. Automated processes mine and filter health-related tweets, visualize changes in rankings over time, and present other keywords frequently associated with each illness. User-centered visualization techniques of monitoring, inspecting, exploring, comparing and forecasting supports all the three stages of SA. An evaluation conducted with experts in health-related domains provided significant insights about awareness of localized health trends and their practical use in their daily work.