Flu Detector

Tweets (user posts on Twitter's microblogging service) usually reveal information about the current life-state of their author. We track this information, and then investigate ways of mapping it to an accurate system for identifying and tracking epidemics of infectious diseases and in particular Influenza like Illness (ILI) in several UK regions.

Flu Detector is a demonstration of this work, a tool which nowcasts flu rates based on tweets on a daily basis.

Publications explaining the methodology are listed on the site. For a better and more thorough understanding of our approach, please read our latest paper that has been accepted for publication on ACM's TIST.