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In an opinion article published by a doctoral candidate at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, the author highlighted the potential as well as impact of social media and digital self-tracking tools on public health.

Social media has been proven to provide cost efficient and practical tools for public health outreach, primarily in the form of health communication and broadly targeted prevention campaigns.  An illustrative example is that of an alcohol harm reduction campaign in New Zealand, targeting the reduction of alcohol consumption at early pregnancy stages. The programme used Facebook’s advertisement functions to target women aged 18-30 with preventive video and banner adds.

The author also highlighted the future role of social media which is expected to shift from communication to constituting essential resources for development of precision public health. The abundance of data generated on various platforms can be harness to target, tailor and personalise public health intervention programmes. For instance, Lutkenhaus and colleagues leverage on Twitter to address vaccine hesitancy in the Netherlands. Through tweets extraction, the group identified key online communities linked to vaccinations, dominant perceptions and misconceptions. It was followed by identifying key social influencers as potential collaborators, through which targeted public health messages can be conveyed to key target groups.

Digital self-tracking for disease prevention is also set to influence future public health. With the era of the Internet of Things having arrived, the large amount of self-tracking data can be exchanged and shared across devices with little to no human involvement, undoubtedly holding large public health potential. 

Source: Mobi Health News