The Twitter Well-Being Tracker was created as a way to start conversations about well-being and promote health change in the Twitterverse. We developed a system for pulling tweets and categorizing them into the six domains of well-being per Healthways’ Well-Being Assessment: Life Evaluation, Physical Health, Emotional Health, Healthy Behaviors, Work Environment, and Basic Access.

Over time, we realized that although capturing and analyzing the conversations about health was important, it would be more satisfying if users could see their own score after answering the questions in the Well-Being Assessment. Moreover, we made the experience social, so users could share with friends on Twitter. If a person’s friends took the test, the Well-Being Tracker would aggregate the scores of the user’s followers and provide an average score for all of the followers.

As we began to mix and match the data, we saw the need for a way to share the aggregated Twitter well-being sentiment daily, which led to the creation of the Well-Being Bot. The sharing of scores was meaningful because it was an example of “connected health,” the concept that health is determined by the health of those around you.

The Twitter Well-Being Tracker showed us that although people were interested in getting their well-being score in a quick and social way, creating the scores using sentiment analysis proved to be expensive and difficult. However, the app gave us an opportunity to iterate on a new type of user interface for these kinds of assessments, and the lessons we learned live on in Daily Challenge. In addition, Deepak Chopra adopted the Twitter Well-Being Tracker for his Wellbeing Movement, which led to a strategic partnership in Daily Challenge.

The Twitter Well-Being Tracker is no longer operating, but you can connect and share about your health by joining the community of Daily Challenge.