These past few months have been exciting here at uGraph.
We are steadily moving toward the official launch of our website ugraph.com in late September or October, and the timing couldn’t be better. H1N1 virus activity has the world talking about flu detection in urgent terms and awareness of illness tracking is peaking due to recent government warnings and guidelines for employers as well as the public to monitor health agencies and remain aware of flu activity as it moves around the world.
uGraph has meanwhile been tracking health related posts on social networks since january 2009 and has collected and filtered (using our proprietary natural language processing) more than 4 million posts from close to 2 million unique users. Currently uGraph is collecting and filtering about 40,000 health related posts a day, and that number is steadily increasing as social media use skyrockets.
This is great news as we enter the start of the school year and flu season here in North America, and the need for awareness of flu symptom activity is at a critical level. uGraph is working with the Multnomah County Health Department here in the Pacific Northwest to build a monitoring system for experimental use by the agency over the next several months to track viral symptom activity. This agency cooperation as well as the interest in uGraph capability demonstrated by Oregon Health Sciences University research departments as well as the Statistics department at Portland State University has uGraph poised to take the world by storm with our web-based mobile tool for tracking and reporting viral symptoms through convenient social network micro blogging interfaces.
uGraph is currently pursuing Federal grants from the National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to assist in the further development and refinement of uGraph technology for use by global health organizations.
The leveraging of existing and rapidly growing social media use for scientific research on a daily reporting scale is a controversial topic that has the medical world in an uproar over how shifts in social behavior and advances in technology can and/or should be incorporated into acceptable mainstream usage as a valuable information resource.
uGraph is proud to be a pioneer in this new and exciting area and we welcome the challenges that lie ahead as we explore what is possible with the help of our community. We plan to post a series of articles related to our efforts over the next several months, and we will also be posting updates to our progress so that you can be ready to bring your health into view (and the health of those around you) this Fall!