influenza - ReadWriteWeb

Tracking Influenza: Google Flu Trends Now Covers 16 More Countries

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:53:45 -0800

Google just announced a major expansion of its Flu Trends program which monitors searches for Flu-related symptoms on Google's search engine to predict Flu outbreaks. Until now, Google only made the data it gathered from searches in the U.S., Mexico, Australia and New Zealand available, but now, Google has expanded the product to cover 16 more countries, including Russia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Spain.

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]]> Flu Trends launched last November, and a lot of people were skeptical about whether Google's data could really be used to track the spread of the flu. According to Google's own research (PDF), which was published in Nature earlier this year, Flu Trends had a 0.92 correlation with the official flu data. Now, with the help of data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Google was also able to validate its models for flu-related queries in Europe. The official data is usually a week or two behind, but Google's data is created in real time.

Google has been very active in the Flu research community. Just a few weeks ago, the company also announced a partnership with the Public Library of Science, which now uses Google Knol to publish data and papers about influenza research.

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Finally a Good Use for Google Knol: Sharing Information About Flu Research

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:31:50 -0800

Last year, Google Knol launched to a lot of hype and skepticism. While, at first, it looked like a possible Wikipedia-challenger, in reality, it didn't attract a lot of users or attention, even though some of the articles on the site are actually quite good and well written. Today, however, Google announced that the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization focused on providing free access to scientific and medical literature, will use Knol to give scientists a place to collaborate and share research on important topics, including influenza research.

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]]> PLoS Currents, as this project is called, will first focus on influenza research and might later expand to other topics. In order to keep the standard of the submissions high, PLoS will be able to use a number of new moderation tools in Knol to vet submissions and comments. Any submission that is accepted for publication will immediately appear on PLoS Currents and will also be publicly archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows anybody to share and remix these papers (with attribution).

Overall, we think this is a great project. Knol is a good, easy-to-use platform for these kinds of publications, and given that the articles are also archived on other servers, this project also doesn't rely on Google to keep Knol's servers running indefinitely.

PLoS, being a non-profit, is also the right organization to give this project a try. Commercial publishers are still wary of the Internet, and while the open access movement has been gathering some support over the last few years, a lot of research in most scientific fields will still be hidden behind paywalls for a long time.

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Google Flu Trends: A Glimpse into the Future of Google Health

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:42:31 -0800

It stands to reason that people who are "starting to come down with something" often take the opportunity to search for information on what ails them, even before they discuss their symptoms with a healthcare professional. Who gets more of those searches than anyone? Google, of course.

When Google started looking more closely at anonymous aggregate searches for "flu symptoms" and the like, they discovered that - after cross-referencing that data against information from the Center for Disease Control - they had the ability to predict flu outbreaks by monitoring search patterns. And now, they've published their findings as Google Flu Trends.

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The effort, part of Google's non-profit arm, google.org, could prove to be the first step toward the type of predictive medical informatics that have long been the Holy Grail of medicine:

"So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza."

Looking at the graphs, Google's hypotheses about search terms predating disease outbreaks seem to be proven correct. Not satisfied with Google's analysis? Feel free to download the data and work with it yourself.

Future Features for Google Heatlh

While influenza is the first target for the experiment, one can easily imagine the types of search data - and regional data - that could help healthcare professionals in the prediction of practically any disease. More importantly for Google, coupling this kind of anonymous aggregated data with other Google offerings could further the company's moves into the healthcare space.

Just imagine, in the not too distant future, if you could be warned of potential disease outbreaks in your city when logging into your personal health record on Google Health. It's not a huge intuitive leap, but it's a leap that puts the responsibility for health in the hands of the individual.

Helping people manage their wellness and health in a preventative way instead of simply treating the disease? That's a truly innovative - and much needed - way of approaching healthcare. Can Google leverage its wealth of data to help spark that healthcare innovation?

One would hope. Our health may depend on it.

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