Exploring the influence of land cover on weight loss awareness

Weight loss is regarded as a commitment for more and more individuals in the US, since obesity is a prevalent public health issue in this country. The geographic environment in which people live and self-awareness of weight status are believed to play an important role bodyweight management. Thus, understanding the association between geographic settings and the awareness of weight status is vital to sustaining or improving quality of life. With the emergence of vast geotagged social media data sources, the analysis of “geographical awareness” of weight status in the context of geographic settings leads to a new research avenue. In order to fully understand the awareness of weight status and the relation with the geographic environment, our analysis was based on weight loss related “tweets” (messages sent on Twitter) and National Land Cover Dataset. We present our findings obtained from modeling: (1) the geographic patterns of weight-loss-related tweets, and (2) how land cover changes impact the weight loss related cyberspace message activities using cross tabulation. The results of analysis are summarized with tables and graphics.