Recognize the Symptoms of Depression Through Twitter

illustration twitter (okz)

NEW YORK - Researchers Microsoft manyatakan that the signs or symptoms of postpartum depression in new mothers can be seen from the changes in their tweets on Twitter. The purpose of this study to identify young mothers who may be experiencing difficulties postpartum period.

"It is interesting if we could identify the individual who has the potential and decreased emotional risk by looking at social media," said co-director mananging Microsoft Reseacrh Lab, Eric Horvitz.

Reported ScientificAmerican, research on postpartum syndrome is part of a larger effort to use social media as a network of sensors to monitor the health of the community. However, the researchers did not claim they can diagnose postpartum depression.

Microsoft team identified 376 new mothers who are also Twitter users are filtered from the special program from June 2011 to April 2012. In cooperation with the Amazon Mechanical Turk to help analyze the context of his tweets before and after childbirth.

"We are studying the language used, how much they did re-tweet, how active they are (young mothers) is to share external links to other sites and how they interact with people on Twitter," said a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Resrarch, Munmun De Choudhury.

The result showed that 71 percent of women will experience a significant change in the use of social networking. Some users experience negative emotions associated with anger, anxiety and sadness. They tend to use the first person pronoun (oneself) in a tweet. This could indicate an increasing focus on themselves.

Seeing this, the Microsoft team postpartum depression invite experts from the University of Washington to see how to create predictive modeling symptoms of postpartum depression. Although there are no plans in the future if Microsoft will develop the technology, but the research team hopes the predictive results can be used to help design a system of warning for those who have these symptoms.

"Postpartum depression is believed to be a condition that often has not been reported by women who just gave birth," said Horvitz.

Wikipedia explains, postpartum depression (PDD) is the depression experienced by women after giving birth to her son. This depression will change many behaviors such as simple sadness, fatigue, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, reduced libido, crying continually, restless and irritable. Although a number of risk factors have been identified, but the cause of PDD has not been well understood