Learning Wellness Profiles of Users on Social Networks: The Case of Diabetes

The increasing popularity of social media has encouraged health consumers to share, explore, and validate health and wellness information on social networks, which provide a rich repository of Patient-Generated Wellness Data (PGWD). While data-driven healthcare has attracted a lot of attention from academia and industry for improving care delivery through personalized healthcare, limited research has been done on harvesting and utilizing PGWD available on social networks. This chapter focuses on wellness profiling of users where we demonstrate algorithms to effectively harvest social media to extract wellness information of individuals as well as construct the latent profile of users. In particular, we study the wellness profile of users in diabetes, with extension to obesity and depression.