How can we better use Twitter to find a person who got lost due to dementia?
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31304299.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41746-018-0017-5 and PMC identifier 6550184.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Twitter is a social media platform for online message sharing. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of using Twitter to search for people who got lost due to dementia. The online messages on Twitter, i.e., tweets, were collected through an Application Programming Interface. Contents of the tweets were analysed. The personal characteristics, features of tweets and types of Twitter users were collected to investigate their associations with whether a person can be found within a month. Logistic regression was used to identify the features that were useful in finding the missing people. Results showed that the young age of the persons with dementia who got lost, having tweets posted by police departments, and having tweets with photos can increase the chance of being found. Social media is reshaping the human communication pathway, which may lead to future needs on a new patient-care model.