Angela Leis*, Medical Association of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Miguel Angel Mayer*, Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Alex Mayer, Medical School, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain Track: Research Presentation Topic: Blogs, Microblogs, Twitter Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Background
Twitter is an Internet micro-blogging social media service that allows users to post short messages (140 characters) about facts, feelings and opinions. Twitter has been proposed by several studies as a means to track public health trends such as influenza outbreaks and swine flu and by analysing user messages it is possible to measure different population features and interests. However, more information is needed about the potential health applications and public health purposes of Twitter.
Objective
To analyse the impact of health events on Twitter messages activity to propose its potential usefulness in education and public health.
Methods
An observational study based on monitoring Twitter messages posted between November 19 and December 5, 2011 was carried out. This period of time included the World Aids Day that takes place every year on 1st December. Messages were obtained using keywords such as “AIDS” in English and “SIDA” in Spanish via the Application Programming Interface (API) Twitter search engine, generating a data file in .json format, containing the different fields of data previously selected. The variables studied were: total and daily number of tweets, language (English and Spanish), tweet content, re-tweets, posting device, user’s id and location. SPSS statistics software was used to analyze the content of the messages database created.
Results
More than 1.1 million tweets (1,127,152) related to AIDS in English, Spanish and other languages were posted between the 19th November and the 5th December on Twitter (51% of them were posted on Thursday 1st December). The information about the location of users was not usual because it was not included in the profile on Twitter. Mobile and smart phones were the devices more used to post the tweets. Tweets included links with general information about AIDS and the World Aids Day, and jokes represented the most numerous re-tweets. There were over 0.7 million unique users and the majority of them posted only one tweet related to the topic.
Conclusions
1. Health events generate an important interest and big impact among users on Twitter taking into account the significant increase of activity in number of tweets related to the topic about AIDS.
2. Twitter and Social Media platforms in general, could be used as a means to spread news and health information of general interest with public health applications.
3. Mobile phones are used extensively and for that reason (m-Health) they have the potential to be used as a means for developing educational and public health activities.
4. More analysis and qualitative studies are needed to better know users’ profile and the semantics of the messages for Twitter to be developed as an effective healthcare and public health tool.