Social Visualization of Health Messages

Seeking health-related information on the Internet is becoming commonplace. Patients use the Internet to learn about their conditions and medications, and to discuss symptoms and concerns with other patients on chat forums. Physicians also browse these chat sites to understand concerns, symptoms, and beliefs of patients that might not be revealed to the physician due to fear. This paper presents a series of visualization themes applied to patient-generated data to allow for the exploration of these data. The themes we address are clustering, history, and sentiment. We describe the process used to extract and prepare the data for visualization and conclude with a discussion of the visualizations and their use for a specific health community.