1. Healthbook®
www.healthbook.com
Social Media (Twitter, Facebook) – based Self-
Tracking and Behavior Change Tool
Gunther Eysenbach, MD MPH FACMI
Professor, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of
Toronto;
Senior Scientist, Centre for Global eHealth Innovation
Co-Director, Communication & Knowledge Translation, Techna Institute
CEO & Publisher, JMIR Publications Inc.
Editor, Journal of Medical Internet Research (www.jmir.org)
Visiting Professor, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, University of Twente, The
Netherlands
Producer, Medicine 2.0 Congress & Social Network (www.medicine20congress.com)
2. Problem/Idea
• Major public health problems (tobacco, physical inactivity,
obesity) require individual behavior change
• Key ingredients of behavior change include modeling, peer-
support, self-monitoring, reinforcement, feedback etc
• Self-monitoring requires data entry, which most people
don’t do over extended periods of time
• However, many people already use social media to enter
and disclose what they are doing, where they are etc.
• Idea: Use individual social media streams (Twitter,
Facebook) as input for personal self-tracking (and
eventually as input into 3rd party behavior change apps,
personal health records etc)
Social Media Analytics Visualization Integration
3. Some random ideas
• Let users define “projects” defined by keywords which
can be classified into healthy/unhealthy behavior and
tracked. Other users can see projects and “reuse”
them. E.g. “workout” = healthy point
• Visualization using Google graphs (trends over time)
• Numeric data extraction e.g. for weight, blood
pressure, glucose level (#bgnow) into charting
• Use location data to “learn” and track health behavior
(“I am at the gym working out! #healthy” – “I am at
McDonalds #unhealthy”)
• Could also be used to track and monitor mood
5. Workflow
• User creates account by logging in with Facebook
and/or Twitter accounts (which will be connected to
Healthbook® account)
• User defines behavior change goals and “projects” (e.g.
goal: weight loss, projects track certain keywords,
phrases, places/locations, numeric data)
• Healthbook® monitors social media status updates of
the user
• Healthbook® Visualizer tracks progress against goals
and population trends, and/or sends out alerts
6. The beauty of it…
• We don’t build a separate application or
community and try to get people to use it.
People are already using social media.
• Peer-support (friends/family) is already “built-
in”
• We can use the same data to study population
trends (business model!)
7. Team
• Developers, ideally interest in social media
(Twitter/FB API) and natural language
processing
• Designer(s) to do a mockup on charting
• Behavior Change experts
