Micro-blogging has increasingly been an important tool for communication among people. The web services like Twitter, Facebook, provide certain kinds of micro-blogging. Typically, they allow you to record your current status, such as your thoughts, your feelings, or your discoveries, etc, and share them among your friends or other people.
Human beings, as social animals, are naturally attracted to these services. From my personal experiences, I have always some interesting ideas (at least I thought), but they are usually not great enough to be written into blogs; also due to laziness, I seldom write them on a paper. Even interesting information gets easily lost, let alone those that are not very interesting, such as what I eat in lunch, whether I do sports today, when I go to sleep, etc. But it turns out that these kinds of information might be very valuable from health care perspective, especially if you have certain kind of illness. The doctors and nurses won’t stick to you to check these information so regularly, because it is very time consuming, and they typically have to take care of many people at the same time. In my opinion, the micro-blogging services provide the essential information recording service so that you could use it to improve your health and tackling your illnesses. For example, you could routinely record your health related micro-information so it can help the doctors to find out what are the causes, combined with the traditional medical records & lab tests; and they might even offer you suggestions on what you could do to improve your health based on your information. If the local-community you are in starts to do micro-blogging as well, then you could get social support as well. There are indeed many issues there, such as privacy protection (you might not want your today’s blood pressure known to the public), that can inhibit the acceptance of this new technology, but this just mean that there are still a lot to be done.
I just found some interesting slides by Phil Baumann, who points out the potential applications of Twitter in Health Care. I will write more on this in the coming weeks.
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