Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine

155 Pages·2016·1.135 MB·English

by  Elad Yom-Tov

Crowdsourced Health

Crowdsourced Health
How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine
Elad Yom-Tov
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, re-
cording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yom-Tov, Elad, author.
Title: Crowdsourced health : how what you do on the Internet will im-
prove medicine / Elad Yom-Tov.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2015] | Includes biblio-
graphical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038415 | ISBN 9780262034500 (hardcover : alk.
paper)
Subjects: | MESH: Crowdsourcing. | Data Mining. | Biomedical Research.
| Internet.
Classification: LCC R858 | NLM W 26.55.I4 | DDC 610.285–dc23 LC re-
cord available at h ttp://lccn.loc.gov/2015038415
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents, Shlomith (RIP) and Yoram, who taught me to
inquire. To Galit and the boys.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Our Data, Ourselves 11
2 Answering the Unaskable 31
3 Anorexia: A Disease Online 49
4 Questions of Public Health 67
5 What Patients Want to Know About Their Disease, and
How Information from the Internet Can Help Them 93
Epilogue 113
Appendix: How Can One Gain Access to Internet Data? 117
Notes 121
Index 141

Acknowledgments
I have had opportunities to work with many talented scientists
in the course of my work. Some are mentioned in this book, and
I am indebted to them all for what they taught me during our
work together, and for the privilege of working with them.
I was, and still am, fortunate to have worked at companies
that value long-term research. My managers at these companies,
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Andrei Broder, and Jennifer Chayes, chal-
lenged me with their questions and ideas to look farther and
deeper. One could not ask for better research managers and
colleagues.
Finally, I am thankful to the editors at the MIT Press and to
Jennifer Collins, who improved the manuscript greatly.