Correlation between National Influenza Surveillance Data and Search Queries from Mobile Devices and Desktops in South Korea

Soo-Yong Shin, Taerim Kim, Dong-Woo Seo, Chang Hwan Sohn, Sung-Hoon Kim, Seung Mok Ryoo, Yoon-Seon Lee, Jae Ho Lee, Won Young Kim and Kyoung Soo Lim

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-10

Abstract: Background: Digital surveillance using internet search queries can improve both the sensitivity and timeliness of the detection of a health event, such as an influenza outbreak. While it has recently been estimated that the mobile search volume surpasses the desktop search volume and mobile search patterns differ from desktop search patterns, the previous digital surveillance systems did not distinguish mobile and desktop search queries. The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of mobile and desktop search queries in terms of digital influenza surveillance. Methods and Results: The study period was from September 6, 2010 through August 30, 2014, which consisted of four epidemiological years. Influenza-like illness (ILI) and virologic surveillance data from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used. A total of 210 combined queries from our previous survey work were used for this study. Mobile and desktop weekly search data were extracted from Naver, which is the largest search engine in Korea. Spearman’s correlation analysis was used to examine the correlation of the mobile and desktop data with ILI and virologic data in Korea. We also performed lag correlation analysis. We observed that the influenza surveillance performance of mobile search queries matched or exceeded that of desktop search queries over time. The mean correlation coefficients of mobile search queries and the number of queries with an r-value of ≥ 0.7 equaled or became greater than those of desktop searches over the four epidemiological years. A lag correlation analysis of up to two weeks showed similar trends. Conclusion: Our study shows that mobile search queries for influenza surveillance have equaled or even become greater than desktop search queries over time. In the future development of influenza surveillance using search queries, the recognition of changing trend of mobile search data could be necessary.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158539 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 58539&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0158539

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158539

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().