Twitter Big Data as a Resource for Exoskeleton Research: A Large-Scale
Dataset of about 140,000 Tweets and 100 Research Questions
Abstract
The exoskeleton technology has been rapidly advancing in the recent past
due to its multitude of applications and diverse use-cases in assisted
living, military, healthcare, firefighting, and industry 4.0. The
exoskeleton market is projected to increase by multiple times of its
current value within the next two years. Therefore, it is crucial to
study the degree and trends of user interest, views, opinions,
perspectives, attitudes, acceptance, feedback, engagement, buying
behavior, and satisfaction, towards exoskeletons, for which the
availability of Big Data of conversations about exoskeletons is
necessary. The Internet of Everything style of today’s living,
characterized by people spending more time on the internet than ever
before, with a specific focus on social media platforms, holds the
potential for the development of such a dataset by the mining of
relevant social media conversations. Twitter, one such social media
platform, is highly popular amongst all age groups, where the topics
found in the conversation paradigms include emerging technologies such
as exoskeletons. To address this research challenge, this work makes two
scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents an
open-access dataset of about 140,000 tweets about exoskeletons that were
posted in a 5-year period from May 21, 2017, to May 21, 2022. Second,
based on a comprehensive review of the recent works in the fields of Big
Data, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Data Mining,
Pattern Recognition, and Artificial Intelligence that may be applied to
relevant Twitter data for advancing research, innovation, and discovery
in the field of exoskeleton research, a total of 100 Research Questions
are presented for researchers to study, analyze, evaluate, ideate, and
investigate based on this dataset.