M.A. Thesis:

Twitter's role in the fight against heart failure: an analysis of cardiac arrest and resuscitation related tweets on Twitter

Today, the importance and necessity of identifying and preventing various types of diseases and natural disasters in social networks, such as Twitter, has become an important research topic. Cardiac arrest, which, of course, is one of the most serious conditions, requires immediate and meticulous action to preserve the body's health. These actions should be based on specific protocols that need the acquisition of field knowledge, skill training and the resuscitator experience, to be accomplished. Thus, the management, standardization and training of the cardiopulmonary resuscitation process that has been addressed on Twitter, is so important from public education point of view. The purpose of this study is awareness and identifying ways to confront cardiac arrest, as well as, related resuscitation education issues, through content analysis, geographic location and emotional analysis of linked tweets of Twitter. Using the Twitter programming interface and keywords, a data set connected to cardiac arrest and resuscitation was collected, and a total of 36,592 tweets were received from 17,943 unique users since November 15, 2016 until January 28, 2017. By analyzing the tweets and categorizing topics, the most important extracted topics by Mallet's software, include: educational institutions, first aid, manufacturers and sellers of products and ways to combat cardiac arrest beside efforts to recover. The results of the analysis of tweets show that in the field of awareness, the group of organizations, because of their followers, has had more impression rather than other groups. The American Heart Association is one of the most prominent institutions that have taken effective steps for education. So, this shows the high level of education from both aspects of quantitative and qualitative, in this country. In analyzing the geographical location, the countries of America, Canada and England have the highest rank in education. Therefore, individuals who live in the regions with inadequate facilities and conditions in terms of awareness and education can take advantage of the potential of the Twitter social network in education.

Keywords: Cardiac arrest, Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Defibrillation, CPR training, Social network Twitter