HARVESTING PATIENT OPINIONS ABOUT IMPLANTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA SOURCES

The increasing use of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, discussion boards) provides a new valuable information source for implant manufacturers about the public reception of a specific implant. On the other hand, patients and caregivers can get first hand experiences from other patients. However, because of the overwhelming amount of data available, tools are required to locate useful information. Often it is more important to get the "Wisdom of the crowd" instead of a single opinion. This paper describes a system which can be used to harvest data from social media and use different filters and analysis tools to aggregate search results.