Blog Assignment: Using SNA to fight Heart Attack

As per the global medical records, there is a clear increase in the number of heart attacks. This could be attributed to a variety of factors, such as complexity in work, over time work, dealing with extreme pressures, personal problems, hereditary problems, etc. Most of the cases have been identified as the working population.

On the other side of the coin, there are more than 1.2 billion of active users connected on various social networks. Most of them are working and student population. Now my idea is to link both these sides of the coin to understand the pattern of heart attacks and try to identify the person/s who would probably be next in line.

Although most of the personal information is easily available publicly on social network, there are certain other parameters that this analysis would require, such as medical history, frequency of heart attack (for those who already had), other medical records, etc. Also, the relationship with the patient that experienced heart attack is also required.

We could design some sort of metrics to identify the next victim of heart attack. How does this work? Well, from the SNA, we could understand the work profile of the person. for e.g. who he interacts with, how the relationship is, how frequently he interacts, is he in top position or not, how long does he work, how does he react to his boss / sub-ordinates, etc. This is a huge volume of data that can be obtained from different sources on Social Network. Giving appropriate weights to every aspect, we could device a measuring technique, so that who ever reaches that threshold number would be in the zone of likely patients.

Through this method, we can easily guess how would be the next victim and save that person with proper medication. Although this is a new idea, I could see a huge potential to make the world a better place through the Social Network Analysis.