This book introduces the field of Health Web Science and presents methods for information gathering from written social media data. It explores the availability and utility of the personal medical information shared on social media platforms and determines ways to apply this largely untapped information source to healthcare systems and public health monitoring. Introducing an innovative concept for integrating social media data with clinical data, it addresses the crucial aspect of combining experiential data from social media with clinical evidence, and explores how the variety of available social media content can be analyzed and implemented. The book tackles a range of topics including social media's role in healthcare, the gathering of shared information, and the integration of clinical and social media data. Application examples of social media for health monitoring, along with its usage in patient treatment are also provided. The book also considers the ethical and legal issues of gathering and utilizing social media data, along with the risks and challenges that must be considered when integrating social media data into healthcare choices. With an increased interest internationally in E-Health, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0 and the recent birth of the discipline of Web Science, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners investigating this emerging topic.

The Web has become a rich source of personal information in the last few years. People twitter, blog, and chat online. Current feelings, experiences or latest news are posted. For instance, first hints to disease outbreaks, customer preferences, or political changes could be identified with this data.

Surveillance or early warning systems enable such detection of changes and support humans in getting information on changing situations. However, the variety of data that could be considered for surveillance is immense, ranging from sensor-measured values to collected counts and information extracted from natural language documents.Denecke's objective is to introduce the multiple possibilities and facets of surveillance and its applications. She first introduces the task of surveillance and provides an overview on surveillance in various domains. Next, the various information sources that are available and could already be used by surveillance systems are summarized. In the main part of the book, her focus is on unstructured data as a source for surveillance. An overview on existing methods as well as methods to be developed in order to process this kind of data with respect to surveillance is presented. As an example application, she introduces disease surveillance using Web 2.0, including corresponding methods and challenges to be addressed. The book closes with remarks on new possibilities for surveillance gained by recent developments of the Internet and mobile communication, and with an outline of future challenges.

Sentiment analysis deals with extracting information about opinions, sentiments, and even emotions conveyed by writers towards topics of interest. Medical sentiment analysis refers to the identification and analysis of sentiments or emotions expressed in free-textual documents with a scope on healthcare and medicine. This fascinating problem offers numerous application areas in the domain of medicine, but also research challenges. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the topic. The primary purpose is to provide the necessary background on medical sentiment analysis, ranging from a description of the notions of medical sentiment to use cases that have been considered already and application areas of relevance.  Medical sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP), text analysis and machine learning to realise the process of extracting and classifying statements regarding expressed opinion and sentiment. The book offers a comprehensive overview on existing methods of sentiment analysis applied to healthcare resources or health-related documents. It concludes with open research avenues providing researchers indications which topics still have to be developed in more depth.

This book introduces the field of Health Web Science and presents methods for information gathering from written social media data. It explores the availability and utility of the personal medical information shared on social media platforms and determines ways to apply this largely untapped information source to healthcare systems and public health monitoring. Introducing an innovative concept for integrating social media data with clinical data, it addresses the crucial aspect of combining experiential data from social media with clinical evidence, and explores how the variety of available social media content can be analyzed and implemented. The book tackles a range of topics including social media's role in healthcare, the gathering of shared information, and the integration of clinical and social media data. Application examples of social media for health monitoring, along with its usage in patient treatment are also provided. The book also considers the ethical and legal issues of gathering and utilizing social media data, along with the risks and challenges that must be considered when integrating social media data into healthcare choices. With an increased interest internationally in E-Health, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0 and the recent birth of the discipline of Web Science, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners investigating this emerging topic.