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Review
. 2012;8(7):e1002616.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002616. Epub 2012 Jul 26.

Digital epidemiology

Marcel Salathé  1 , Linus Bengtsson, Todd J Bodnar, Devon D Brewer, John S Brownstein, Caroline Buckee, Ellsworth M Campbell, Ciro Cattuto, Shashank Khandelwal, Patricia L Mabry, Alessandro Vespignani
Affiliations
Review

Digital epidemiology

Marcel Salathé et al. PLoS Comput Biol. 2012.

Abstract

Mobile, social, real-time: the ongoing revolution in the way people communicate has given rise to a new kind of epidemiology. Digital data sources, when harnessed appropriately, can provide local and timely information about disease and health dynamics in populations around the world. The rapid, unprecedented increase in the availability of relevant data from various digital sources creates considerable technical and computational challenges.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Map generated by more than 250 million public tweets (collected from Twitter.com) with high-resolution location information, broadcast between March 2011 and January 2012.
Inset shows greater Los Angeles area. Brightness of color corresponds to geographic density of tweets.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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