21. Learning from Medical Social Media Data: Current State and Future Challenges

The amount of social media data dealing with medical and health issues increased significantly in the last couple of years. Patients, physicians, and other health professionals are willing to share their knowledge and experiences in the Web. Medical social media data now provides a new source of information within a learning context, for various learners. The variety of such content provides opportunities for a broad range of applications to exploit this data and support these learners in gaining knowledge. A potential benefit is that communication barriers are much lower for social media tools than communication through traditional channels. The objective of this chapter is to highlight the potentials for learning from medical social media data. Various characteristics of learning from this data will be presented and their impact to groups of learners is highlighted. Further, potential real-world applications are described. Taking this as a basis, the challenges for technology development in this context will be discussed.