Health Stories
Our Goals
What do we hope to accomplish?
The collection and distribution of interesting health stories will have an important impact on communities that participate. Potential benefits range from a more educated population to decreased prevalence of many preventable diseases. The app will also be useful to doctors and researchers interested in studying peoples' health and lifestyles through a social media perspective.
Education
The mission of Health Stories will always be to educate and motivate people. Enabling people to hear from others with similar backgrounds and lifestyles will have a greater effect in motivating people to learn more about important health issues. By learning about preventable health conditions earlier on, people will be able to take action to improve their future health.
Data
Social media activity can provide information about patients’ lives that could be useful to the researchers who want to study the lifestyle and background of people with certain conditions. Previous studies have shown that some aspects of a persons health are strongly connected to social media activity and in some cases, can even be predicted based on online activity alone. The app will facilitate the collection of relevant data that may normally be difficult to aggregate. We plan to form data partnerships with research groups and other organizations that can use this data to advance medical and health knowledge and conduct further analysis. This will allow us both to identify areas in which health can be improved and to determine better ways to grow the popularity of health stories.
Networks
Consolidating health information and discussion into one platform will also allow us to identify networks of information exchange between people. This can be useful in identifying the most effective ways of distributing stories as well as studying how people interact. The connections made with health-minded people also have other crucial applications. Previous studies conducted by members of our team have looked into the effect of social networks on the rates of organ donation in different areas (See Figure). Combining this knowledge with additional data collected through Health Stories will provide insight into techniques to connect to the social groups with historically low organ donation rates and deliver content that encourages donation.
