Thursday
Mar172011
The Story of the Twitter Well-Being Tracker
March 17, 2011 by Trapper Marklez, Head of Product
The Twitter Well-Being Tracker didn’t start out as the Twitter Well-Being Tracker. It started out as an idea to data mine Twitter before it morphed naturally into a way to categorize and analyze conversations -- and ultimately ended as an online quiz optimized for Twitter.
Here’s the whole story of the Twitter Well-Being Tracker:
Once upon a time, a company named Healthways created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, or WBI, a national survey that provides a comprehensive, real-time look at the public health and well-being in the U.S. The WBI is based on telephone interviews with at least 1,000 U.S. adults each day. Over one million people have been surveyed since the survey launched in 2008, making it the nation’s largest and most comprehensive look at overall well-being.
Although it’s an accurate description of a population's well-being, the WBI was not designed to predict the well-being of me, or you, or any other person on an individual level.
To remedy this, Healthways, the parent company of MeYou Health, partnered with leading behavioral scientists to create an assessment tool for individuals. This tool is called the Well-Being Assessment (WBA), which Healthways administers to employers, health plans and other organizations. MeYou Health has adapted the WBA for online use and calls it the Well-Being Tracker, or WBT.
When we first started on this journey we asked: “Is it possible to find out the well-being of Twitter by capturing the conversations and analyzing the sentiment?”
From that question we worked to develop a system for pulling tweets, categorizing them into the six domains of well-being (Life Evaluation, Physical Health, Emotional Health, Health Behaviors, Work Environment and Basic Access), and scoring them using sentiment analysis.
Here’s the whole story of the Twitter Well-Being Tracker:
Once upon a time, a company named Healthways created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, or WBI, a national survey that provides a comprehensive, real-time look at the public health and well-being in the U.S. The WBI is based on telephone interviews with at least 1,000 U.S. adults each day. Over one million people have been surveyed since the survey launched in 2008, making it the nation’s largest and most comprehensive look at overall well-being.
Although it’s an accurate description of a population's well-being, the WBI was not designed to predict the well-being of me, or you, or any other person on an individual level.
To remedy this, Healthways, the parent company of MeYou Health, partnered with leading behavioral scientists to create an assessment tool for individuals. This tool is called the Well-Being Assessment (WBA), which Healthways administers to employers, health plans and other organizations. MeYou Health has adapted the WBA for online use and calls it the Well-Being Tracker, or WBT.
When we first started on this journey we asked: “Is it possible to find out the well-being of Twitter by capturing the conversations and analyzing the sentiment?”
From that question we worked to develop a system for pulling tweets, categorizing them into the six domains of well-being (Life Evaluation, Physical Health, Emotional Health, Health Behaviors, Work Environment and Basic Access), and scoring them using sentiment analysis.
Soon after, we completed the technology to score Twitter, the Community Clash project came along demanding that we parse conversations for various dimensions of health as tracked by the Federal Community Health Data initiative. So we used the Twitter classification technology to build the Tweet-stream for Community Clash:
After Community Clash shipped, we turned our attention back to the Well-Being Tracker. By this time, we realized what was most the most interesting part of the WBT: allowing people to get their own score.
By answering the Well-Being Tracker questions, you receive a score which you can then share with friends on Twitter. And further more, if your friends take the test, the Well-Being Tracker can aggregate all the scores of your followers and provide you an average score for all your followers.
Why show you the score of your followers? In connected health, the belief is that your health is determined by the health of those around you. Knowing the health of your followers tells you about the type of people you associate with and their impact on you.
Where we are today with the Well-Being Tracker
As we started to mix and match all this different data coming from you, Twitter, and trying to aggregate scores for your friends, it became apparent that the best way to approach the conversations on Twitter as well as the sentiment analysis would be to break it out in two parts: the Well-Being Tracker and the Well-Being Bot. The latter of which tweets out the aggregated Twitter well-being sentiment on a daily basis.
What’s the end result of all this? Simply, to create conversations about well-being. By answering questions related to well-being, you can learn a lot about the types of things that impact your health, your life, and your happiness. Give it a try. Get your score today. What you do with it is up to you!
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