Twitter may help hospitals anticipate a spike in asthma attacks

PREDICTIVE TEXTS: By analysing air quality data in combination with the volume of asthma-related tweets, researchers are able to predict with 75% accuracy whether the number of asthma-related emergency room visits would be low, medium or high on a given day.

Researchers are leveraging the microblogging platform to predict the volume of asthma-related emergency room visits one Dallas hospital can expect on a given day. 

For those who can see beyond the chatter, Twitter contains a trove of potentially useful data, including information that may be of interest to the medical community.