Workshop on Mining Online Health Reports

The Workshop on Mining Online Health Reports aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers interested in automatically analysing consumer-generated data for health applications. Online health information is widely published by individuals in social media, chat rooms and discussion boards. At the same time search query logs and various forms of text messaging contain a vast amount of textual information that can be directly or indirectly linked to health conditions. This informal evidence about our individual health, attitudes and behaviours has the potential to be a valuable source for health applications ranging from real-time disease monitoring, to prioritising victim responses during disasters and detecting novel applications for drugs. Informal patient data on the Web is increasing, accessible, low cost, real-time and seems likely to cover a significant proportion of the population. Coupled with wearable body sensor data and the wealth of structured clinical data, it has the potential to offer insights leading to new lines of clinical investigation. However, in order to understand and integrate this data, researchers in academia and industry must grapple with theoretical, practical and ethical challenges that require immediate attention.