Researchers Can Tell How Healthy Your Neighborhood Is From Your Facebook Page

Public health researchers are already using social media to track the rise and spread in real time of infectious diseases. Flu season, for instance, now announces itself each winter with a spike in Google searches for the term and its related symptoms. Using similar data, we can also trace the geography of Denge Fever. But chronic disease has been a different matter. There's no mapping the spread of obesity on Twitter, or identifying an outbreak of high Body Mass Index through Google search queries.

There is, however, one place on the Internet where people everywhere – in really fine-grained detail – chronicle the ongoing conditions of their daily lives: Facebook. Your Facebook page is in many ways a reflection of you (or the you that you want your friends to see). In theory, it should also reflect whether you're out running marathons and bookmarking Cooking Lite recipes, or whether you spent the last five weekends on the couch with the remote.