Anywhere you go these days, whether it’s the dentist’s office, grocery
store, or restaurant, you’ll of course notice people gazing at their
smartphones and surfing the
Web. It’s no secret that we spend a great deal of time on various
social media networks from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube, among others. In fact, according to
Inc.,
every minute of each day, we collectively upload hundreds of hours of
video, pin thousands of images, and share more than 1.7 million photos.
Our activities online don’t only provide a wealth of data useful for
marketers and law enforcement — for researchers in Canada, social media
may become an important tool for monitoring signs of mental illness,
says CBC News. As part
of $48 million in federal funding
for 76 research teams in Canada, $464,100 was granted to University of
Ottawa Professor Diana Inkpen for “social web mining and sentiment
analysis for mental illness detection.”
Danika Gagnon, Media Relations for the University says in a recent
release that the team includes scientists from University of Ottawa,
University of Alberta, and the Université de Montpellier (France), as
well as Canada’s Advanced Symbolics, for collecting and sampling the
data. The team plans to apply social web mining and sentiment analysis
methods to social media data to detect those who are at risk for mental
illness. The data will be used to identify negative emotions that are
either very strong or that frequently appear over extended periods of
time, as well as changes in individual online activities such
as suddenly posting very angry or strange messages
Inkpen says they can then help notify parents, school counselors, or
medical professionals whose patients agree to be monitored. Further,
Inkpen told CBC that negative emotions could show early signs of
possible mental disorders. “It could be depression, it could be
anorexia, it could be other kinds of early mental illness signs
No comments:
Post a Comment