Google Flu Trends - Helps you Stay Healthy
Public Health Initiative to Track Statewide Influenza Levels
Nov 12, 2008
We already use Google to keep track of the page views on our websites, to blog via Blogger, to Search, to find our way via Google Earth and now to check out the health status – actually the influenza level - in our state with Google Flu Trends.
Public Health Initiative – Google Flu Trends
Google's new public health initiative, Google Flu Trends, aggregates searches for "flu symptoms" that millions of people type in every week and predicts the current flu activity level state by state based on that week's data.
This public health initiative from Google.com (the philanthropic arm), came about after Google discovered that when cross-referencing their “flu symptoms” data against information from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) - they had the ability to predict flu outbreaks by monitoring search patterns. This evolved into Google Flu Trends.
When Google compared an early version of its Flu Trends last year with the CDC's own records, it accurately estimated the extent of disease up to two weeks more quickly in each of the agency's nine surveillance areas.
"By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza," a Google spokesperson said.
How Does Google’s Flu Trends Work?
If someone has a fever, headache, cough and runny nose, they might go to Google and type the words "flu symptoms" to see whether they've come down with influenza even before they go to a doctor.
The fact is that each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information and as it happens, there are more flu-related searches during flu season when people check out symptoms online.
Google Flu Trends, a public health initiative from Google.org, operates on the idea that there's likely to be a flu outbreak in states where flu-related search terms are currently popular.
Cross Referenced with Center for Disease Control
Google acknowledges that not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. “We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States” they say on their website."
To support the effectiveness of the new Google Flu Trends tool, the organization explains that it ran a limited version of Flu Trends during the 2007-2008 flu season and shared the results every week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine regions of the USA that they surveyed, Google Flu Trends was able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.
Google Protects Privacy
According to Google, Flu Trends would never be used to identify individual users but it knows what state users are in. The search engine relies on aggregated counts, made anonymously, of how often certain search terms occur each week.
Future of Google Health
So, is this internet predictive way the future of health care - health-per-click?
Helping people manage their wellness and health in a preventative way using the Net instead of simply treating the disease is certainly innovative - and much needed.
While influenza is the first target for this experiment, one can easily imagine the types of search data - and regional data - that could help health care professionals in the prediction of practically any disease.
Source:
Google.org
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