HHS Wants to Use Your Tweets to Help You Quit Smoking

The Department of Health and Human Services wants to harvest smoking-related tweets to understand how citizens feel about the practice -- and eventually help them quit.

HHS plans to collect public tweets mentioning keywords such as “smoking” and “tobacco use,” posted between Jan. 1. 2009, and Oct. 15, 2015, organizing them by geographical location and examining them for hints about their attitude toward the behavior.

The goal is to understand tobacco use across socioeconomic strata, including disadvantaged populations, Tsz Choi, an HHS project officer, told Nextgov in a statement. HHS plans to use the geographic location of Twitter posts and their proximity to economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to identify the target population. 

Choi is an investigator for HHS’ National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Ultimately, HHS staff hopes to create a “a more supportive social environment” encouraging disadvantaged smokers to quit smoking.  

Choi said HHS only intends to examine tweets mentioning specific keywords, and has no plans to follow users who mention those keywords to collect nontobacco-related tweets.

HHS is awarding a sole source contract for the analysis to Alexandria-based company SecondHelix, a post on FedBizOpps said. The company plans to build an algorithm to classify tweets by sentiment automatically.

(Image via simone mescolini/Shutterstock.com)