Social Media and Health

Raina Merchant and colleagues want to raise awareness about automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and use artwork to make AED locations more memorable. In a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health, Merchant et al use an online crowdsourcing design contest -- the Defibrillator Design Challenge -- to engage the public to this end. The goal of the project was not to install designs submitted as part of the contest, but to test whether the public would create them, vote on them, and share them. It is a follow-up to...

In the journal Psychological Science, Johannes C. Eichstaedt and colleagues, including Raina Merchant, analyze Twitter language to look for correlation with community-level mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Using a ‘social media language model’, a cross-sectional regression, they find statistically significant relationships between negative sentiment and higher mortality – and protective effects of positive sentiment. Most of the relationships remain significant after controlling for income and education. The authors posit that their model predicts AHD mortality...

In Healthcare, Charlene Wong and Raina Marchant, along with Megan Moreno of the University of Washington, discuss how to improve health-related communication with young people through the use of social media. With relatively low health care utilization, while at the same time being ubiquitous users and often the earliest adopters of social media, many adolescents and young adults might be better reached via social media than through traditional channels. The authors suggest that social media could be used for everything from providing information on issues like sexual and mental health to...