Supplementing Obesity-Related Surveillance with Persistent Health Assessment Tools

We developed Persistent Health Assessment Tools, PHAT, to equip public health policy makers with more precise tools and timely information for measuring the success of obesity prevention programs. PHAT monitors social media to supplement traditional surveillance by making real-time estimates based on observations of obesity-relevant behaviors. Specifically, we developed models for predicting obesity rates from sets of tweets and developed a dashboard to provide interactive navigation and time slicing.