Information generally openly accessible to the public on the Internet, which has led to an interest in the development of digital public health surveillance systems.
Internet use has been increasing steadily over the past 20 years. In the United States in 2000 52% of adults use the internet, and in 2019 90%. The use of social networking and internet social platforms has increased significantly worldwide, in just four years users increased from having an average of 6.2 social networking profiles in 2015 to 8 in 2019
“The low-cost data stream available on social media and other Internet-based sources is increasingly harnessed by clinicians, patients, and the general public to disseminate insights into disease trends and promote healthy lifestyles and health policies”, the authors explain in the article's introduction.
Canadian medical researchers published the article, “Digital public health surveillance: a systematic scoping review,” in Nature. A systematic scoping review according to the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, on digital public health surveillance systems.
They used natural language processing and content analysis to analyze and define search strings in Global Health, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar. The searches represented data from 2005 to 2020. "Seven hundred and fifty-five articles were included in this review. The studies were from 54 countries and used 26 digital platforms to study 208 subcategories of 49 categories associated with 16 public health surveillance topics," the authors explain.
Fifty-six percent of the studies were conducted in the United States and related to topics such as communicable diseases or behavioral risk factors.
However, the results showed that, despite the rise of the Internet globally, it was not represented in published studies on digital public health surveillance systems. Few papers studied the demographics of internet users when developing such a system, although studies related to social networks and messaging platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) were found.
“Our findings show a higher prevalence of digital surveillance systems for communicable diseases (25%, 187). One possible reason for this is that topics such as seasonal outbreaks and epidemics, sexually transmitted and infectious diseases, can be coalesced in this category, making it a far-reaching one,” the authors explained.
Continue reading at the following link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-021-00407-6
