Internet-Mediated Health

The majority of Internet users turn to the web for information when they have a medical concern. The data generated while users seek such information, and more generally when they browse the Internet for work and pleasure, represent a potential boon for medical research. During the past decade these data have proven valuable where the most patient activity happens online, where internet data provides a more sensitive indicator than that attainable from traditional sources, and where reports from people suffer from significant reporting bias. Crowdsourced Health aims to create tools for identifying correlational and causal links between human behaviors and health outcomes, and to apply these tools to online data.