Leveraging online social media for capturing observations of daily living and ecological momentary assessment

Observations of daily living (ODLs) are important information for empowering users to understand their health and well-being, and while shared with clinicians, ODLs can be used to improve diagnosis and treatment. On the other hand, clinicians and researchers are interested in performing ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to better understand health-related behavior patters in order to diagnose and treat health conditions. We envision the use of user-generated content and user activity logs in Online Social Networks (OSNs) to glean ODLs and perform EMA. Open platforms of major OSNs would allow the development of third-party applications ("apps ") to capture health related data. The data gathered by an "app " can be sent to a Cloud-based server that can process the data to glean ODLs and then add them into personal health records (PHRs) or to perform EMA.