#hayfever; A Longitudinal Study into Hay Fever Related Tweets in the UK

This paper describes a longitudinal study that has collected and analysed over 512,000 UK geolocated tweets over 2 years from June 2012 that contained instances of the words "hayfever" and "hay fever". The results indicate that the temporal distribution of the tweets collected in 2014 correlates strongly (r=0.97, p<0.01) with incidents of hay fever reported by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) in the same year. An analysis of the content of the tweets indicates that users are self-reporting common, often severe symptoms as well as the uses of medication. We conclude that hay fever related tweets provide a real-time, free and easily accessible source of data at a finer level of granularity than currently available data sets. The implications for researchers, health professionals and sufferers are also discussed.