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Analysis of an online health social network

Published: 11 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

With the continued advances of Web 2.0, health-centered Online Social Networks (OSNs) are emerging to provide knowledge and support for those interested in managing their own health. Despite the success of the OSNs for better connecting the users through sharing statuses, photos, blogs, and so on, it is unclear how the users are willing to share health related information and whether these specialpurpose OSNs can actually change the users' health behaviors to become more healthy.
This paper provides an empirical analysis of a health OSN, which allows its users to record their foods and exercises, to track their diet progress towards weight-change goals, and to socialize and group with each other for community support. Based on about five month data collected from more than 107,000 users, we studied their weigh-in behaviors and tracked their weight-change progress. We found that the users' weight changes correlated positively with the number of their friends and their friends' weight-change performance. We also show that the users' weight changes have rippling effects in the OSN due to the social influence. The strength of such online influence and its propagation distance appear to be greater than those in the real-world social network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of a large-scale modern health OSN.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IHI '10: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
November 2010
886 pages
ISBN:9781450300308
DOI:10.1145/1882992
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 November 2010

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Author Tags

  1. correlation analysis
  2. health osn
  3. social influence

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IHI '10
IHI '10: ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
November 11 - 12, 2010
Virginia, Arlington, USA

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  • (2024)Influence of Health Social Network Sites on Chronic Disease Management: A Systematic Review2024 IST-Africa Conference (IST-Africa)10.23919/IST-Africa63983.2024.10569915(1-9)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2023)Social Media is not a Health Proxy: Differences Between Social Media and Electronic Health Record Reports of Post-COVID SymptomsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35796247:CSCW1(1-25)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
  • (2020)A new approach to capturing pain disclosure in daily life in-person and onlineJournal of Health Psychology10.1177/135910532091832226:13(2577-2591)Online publication date: 18-May-2020
  • (2019)Mining of Medical Trends Using Social NetworksHealthcare Policy and Reform10.4018/978-1-5225-6915-2.ch036(786-804)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2018)Inferring Community Structure in Healthcare ForumsMethods of Information in Medicine10.3414/ME12-02-000352:02(160-167)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2018
  • (2018)Peer-Based Social Media Features in Behavior Change Interventions: Systematic ReviewJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/jmir.834220:2(e20)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2018
  • (2018)Feature engineering for sentiment analysis in e-health forumsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.020799613:11(e0207996)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2018
  • (2018)Real Friendship and Virtual Friendship: Differences in Similarity of Contents/People and Proposal of Classification Models on SNS2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI)10.1109/WI.2018.00-68(354-360)Online publication date: Dec-2018
  • (2018)Combating Health Inequalities Using IT: The Case of Games for Controlling Diabetes and Obesity in Chicago’s South SideWell-Being in the Information Society. Fighting Inequalities10.1007/978-3-319-97931-1_19(233-241)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2018
  • (2017)Factors Associated With Weight Change in Online Weight Management Communities: A Case Study in the LoseIt Reddit CommunityJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/jmir.581619:1(e17)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2017
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