Paper Info
Title
Analysis of an online health social network
Abstract
With the continued advances of Web 2.0, health-centered Online Social Networks (OSNs) are emerging to provide knowledge and support for those interested in managing their own health. Despite the success of the OSNs for better connecting the users through sharing statuses, photos, blogs, and so on, it is unclear how the users are willing to share health related information and whether these specialpurpose OSNs can actually change the users' health behaviors to become more healthy. This paper provides an empirical analysis of a health OSN, which allows its users to record their foods and exercises, to track their diet progress towards weight-change goals, and to socialize and group with each other for community support. Based on about five month data collected from more than 107,000 users, we studied their weigh-in behaviors and tracked their weight-change progress. We found that the users' weight changes correlated positively with the number of their friends and their friends' weight-change performance. We also show that the users' weight changes have rippling effects in the OSN due to the social influence. The strength of such online influence and its propagation distance appear to be greater than those in the real-world social network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first detailed study of a large-scale modern health OSN.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1882992.1883035
IHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
social network,weight-change progress,weight-change goal,health osn,weight change,specialpurpose osns,own health,large-scale modern health,health behavior,weight-change performance,share health,online health,data collection,social influence
World Wide Web,Social network,Psychology,Social influence,Socialization,Correlation analysis
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
1.51
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaoxiao Ma120214.68
Guanling Chen299961.99
Juntao Xiao3232.09