Careful what you say on Twitter.
Your tweets will now help determine if a mental health professional should come knocking at your door.
Okay maybe not your door but a new Twitter tool developed in Australia will; “ultimately predict when and where potentially life-saving services are required”, said lead researcher Helen Christensen of Australia’s Black Dog Institute.
The Twitter tool was launched this week and will collect data based on keywords used in tweets all over the world to determine the mental mood of various areas. Using 600 key emotive words like; love, joy, happiness, anger, fear and illness, “We Feel” will analyse around 32 000 tweets a minute (estimated to be about 10% of all English language tweets) which will assist with research and treatment of mood disorders like depression.
“The power of this information cannot be underestimated. Currently, mental health researchers and associated public health programmes use population data that can be over five years old,” added professor Christensen – director of the institute.
Australia’s science body CSIRO will process and analyse the data with Amazon’s remote computing services. It is expected that huge volumes of data will be produced using tweets from about 225 million active monthly users from all over the globe.
But trawling tweets still means a significant lack of data. In some cases it is impossible to determine the gender and identity of those using this social media platform. Yet project leader and post-doctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute, Bridianne O’Dea said, ‘We Feel” will still allow for a better understanding of the mental condition of users frequenting Twitter.
“This demonstrates that we can monitor people over time, we can pick up trends, and now it’s about validating this and seeing if these trends are indicative of what’s really going on,” said O’Dea.
“Now that we can collect data over time, we can do time comparisons and pretty much get a greater understanding of how people are using these technologies to express how they feel — because we don’t know that yet. Nobody knows that yet,” added O’Dea.
Let’s hope this tool was developed before the new budget announced the slashing of CSIRO’s funding by $111.4 million over the next 4 years. It might be four more years before Australians will be able to make technological news again…
The “We Feel” tool can be accessed at wefeel.csiro.au.
