Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine

by Elad Yom-Tov

Overview

How data from our health-related Internet searches can lead to discoveries about diseases and symptoms and help patients deal with diagnoses.

Most of us have gone online to search for information about health. What are the symptoms of a migraine? How effective is this drug? Where can I find more resources for cancer patients? Could I have an STD? Am I fat? A Pew survey reports more than 80 percent of American Internet users have logged on to ask questions like these. But what if the digital traces left by our searches could show doctors and medical researchers something new and interesting? What if the data generated by our searches could reveal information about health that would be difficult to gather in other ways? In this book, Elad Yom-Tov argues that Internet data could change the way medical research is done, supplementing traditional tools to provide insights not otherwise available. He describes how studies of Internet searches have, among other things, already helped researchers track to side effects of prescription drugs, to understand the information needs of cancer patients and their families, and to recognize some of the causes of anorexia.

Yom-Tov shows that the information collected can benefit humanity without sacrificing individual privacy. He explains why people go to the Internet with health questions; for one thing, it seems to be a safe place to ask anonymously about such matters as obesity, sex, and pregnancy. He describes in detrimental effects of “pro-anorexia” online content; tells how computer scientists can scour search engine data to improve public health by, for example, identifying risk factors for disease and centers of contagion; and tells how analyses of how people deal with upsetting diagnoses help doctors to treat patients and patients to understand their conditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262334815
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/11/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	333 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elad Yom-Tov is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Visiting Scientist at Technion-Israel Institute for Technology. He previously held positions at Yahoo Research and IBM Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Our Data, Ourselves 11

2 Answering the Unaskable 31

3 Anorexia: A Disease Online 49

4 Questions of Public Health 67

5 What Patients Want to Know About Their Disease, and How Information from the Internet Can Help Them 93

Epilogue 113

Appendix: How Can One Gain Access to Internet Data? 117

Notes 121

Index 141

What People are Saying About This

Eric Topol

Medical research is undergoing radical transformation, but until now we've just scratched the surface of how massive online data can be harnessed to improve health care. Yom-Tov—who has been a leader in this field—makes a solid case for why we must and how we can achieve this important objective.

Norman Swan

Despite the constant headlines of breakthroughs in medical research, they are, in truth, few and far between. We desperately need to accelerate discovery, and for that we need scale beyond the confines of individual laboratories. The ideas in Elad Yom-Tov's book have the potential to disrupt conventional thinking and make a huge difference to human health.

From the Publisher

Medical research is undergoing radical transformation, but until now we've just scratched the surface of how massive online data can be harnessed to improve health care. Yom-Tov—who has been a leader in this field—makes a solid case for why we must and how we can achieve this important objective.

—Eric Topol, MD, Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Research Institute; author of The Patient Will See You Now and The Creative Destruction of Medicine

Watch out NSA. This book tells us the 'good news' about large-scale data collected over the Internet—it can be used to identify side effects of drugs and, more generally, augment medical research. In clear and simple prose, Elad Yom-Tov makes a compelling case for the magic of crowdsourcing health.

—Oren Etzioni, CEO, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Despite the constant headlines of breakthroughs in medical research, they are, in truth, few and far between. We desperately need to accelerate discovery, and for that we need scale beyond the confines of individual laboratories. The ideas in Elad Yom-Tov's book have the potential to disrupt conventional thinking and make a huge difference to human health.

—Norman Swan, MD, medical broadcaster and journalist

Oren Etzioni

Watch out NSA. This book tells us the 'good news' about large-scale data collected over the Internet—it can be used to identify side effects of drugs and, more generally, augment medical research. In clear and simple prose, Elad Yom-Tov makes a compelling case for the magic of crowdsourcing health.