Understanding the diversity of user requirements for interactive online health services

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and E-Health

et al. 2020

A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a "human-to-machine" communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the "human-to-human" communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the "right" amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals. 1 INTRODUCTION According to the World Health Organization (WHO), empowerment is "a process through which people gain greater control over decisions and actions affecting their health" (WHO, 1998). It includes, as a basic step, the acquisition of health/medical information that helps patients/citizens to understand medical conditions and treatments, acquire selfconfidence to discuss them with medical professionals and, together, make the best-informed decisions (Akerkar & Bichile, 2004; Smith, 2004). The main source of health/medical information is, nowadays, the World Wide Web (or Web, for short) with the number of Web health information seekers that have been steadily increasing over the years (Pew Research Center, 2013; Taylor, 2010). Search engines are more and more used as the main tools to provide Web information. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. The use of a search engine for Web information retrieval entails a human-to-machine communication process between the user (e.g., a patient) and the search engine. It affects, among others, the amount, comprehension and use of the found information. This, in turn, may facilitate or complicate the humanto-human communication process between patients and healthcare professionals such as doctors (Smith, 2004). Communication processes have been modelled in various ways in the past decades. One of the most famous communication model is the one introduced by Morris in relation to its theory of signs (Morris, 1938). It is made up of three levels, i.e., syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It is paired up by another communication model introduced by Shannon...

Section: A Custom Engine For Tailored Retrieval Of Health Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and E-Health

et al. 2020

“…In line with the empowerment process, [2] reports that health information seekers are those people who seek to clarify, confirm or question advice from health professionals through their search and assessment of online health information sites. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years [3], [4] so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Provision of Tailored Health Information for Patient Empowerment

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies

et al. 2019

Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards their empowerment. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. Moreover, specific search engines/sites mostly work on medical literature and are built by hand. This paper analyses the possibility of providing the user with tailored web information by exploiting the web semantic capabilities and, in particular, those of schema.org and its healthlifesci extension. After presenting a short review of the main user requirements when searching for health information on the Internet, an analysis of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension is shown to understand the main properties and semantic capabilities in the health/medical domain. Finally, an initial mapping among user requirements and schema.org elements is presented in order to provide expert and non-expert user categories with web pages that satisfy their specific requirements.

“…As seen in Table 1, the papers dealing with the language complexity user requirement are [10], [13], [16], [17] and [18]. In particular, [10] presents a survey on user requirements which shows that users want to know if the information they search for is explained in the same way their doctor would but they do not present a solution for providing this type of information as we do in this work.…”

Section: Characteristics and Requirements Of On-line Health Informatimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, [10] presents a survey on user requirements which shows that users want to know if the information they search for is explained in the same way their doctor would but they do not present a solution for providing this type of information as we do in this work. Similarly, [13] shows that users feel that the language used must be easy to understand but there is no practical indication on how to achieve it. The system presented in [16] contains a slider that allows to specify the reading level but the system only works with a small amount of information (few pages created by hand) whereas our system automatically works in real time with the health/medical resources provided by schema.org (tens of thousands of Web pages) and, in non-real time, with the whole Internet (through Google).…”

Section: Characteristics and Requirements Of On-line Health Informatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Complexity in On-line Health Information Retrieval

Communications in Computer and Information Science

et al. 2020

The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the years so it is crucial to understand their specific requirements in order to help them finding easily and quickly the specific information they are looking for. Although generic search engines are typically used by health information seekers as the starting point for searching information, they have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory because they make generic searches, often overloading the user with the provided amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts but not for non-experts. A question then arises: Is it possible to facilitate the search of on-line health/medical information based on specific user requirements? In this paper, after analysing the main characteristics and requirements of on-line health seeking, we provide a first answer to this question by exploiting the Web structured data for the health domain and presenting a system that allows different types of users, i.e., non-medical experts and medical experts, to retrieve Web pages with language complexity levels suitable to their expertise. Furthermore, we apply our methodology to the results of a generic search engine, such as Google, in order to re-rank them and provide different users with the proper health/medical Web pages in terms of language complexity.