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.
Highlights
Dementia is a syndrome of a complex, irreversible and relentlessly progressive loss of cognitive function.[1]
A total of 45,719 tweets about people who got lost due to dementia were collected in April and May 2017 in Twitter
60 lost people were identified by natural language processing using contents from 153 original tweets
Summary
Dementia is a syndrome of a complex, irreversible and relentlessly progressive loss of cognitive function.[1]. Getting lost is a common and unpredictable phenomenon for a person with dementia. Previous research indicated the chance of a person who got lost due to dementia or Alzheimer’s disease ranged from 46 to 71%, and they might get lost during usual daily activities.[9,11,12,13,14] In previous studies, the majority of patients with dementia failed to recognise their ways back to the original locations when they get lost due to difficulties in processing route information or even initiating a conversation with other people on the street.[9,11,15] The consequences of a person with dementia getting lost can be hazardous.[1,9,16,17]
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