Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: The Allure of Misinformation is a Postmodern Healthcare Age

Misinformation is publicized as the next big public health crisis. Its exploitative nature allows it to both embed in seemingly legitimate facets of public discourse and disrupt public health initiatives. It collectively influences individual health decisions through a strategy of personal, message-oriented and emotional narrative. Utilizing the lens of vaccines, specifically the controversy surrounding the HPV vaccine in North Carolina, this study illuminates on health misinformation as an instigator of public conversation, vaccine hesitancy, and its subversion of evidence-based authority. This study provides a comparative analysis of both public and legislative perspectives, revealing a mismatch between the information needs of the public and the information written into state vaccine law. The findings offer a preliminary step towards understanding how misinformation persists in the public sphere and affords insights into how public health can evolve to better encourage autonomous health decision-making, minimizing the influence misinformation holds over its audience.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Pathologies of the Post-Truth Era: Vaccine hesitancy, fake science and the post-factual debate on the MMR vaccine

In 2019, the World Health Organization identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health. One of the most noteworthy of ‘eradicated’ diseases in the Western world - measles, has made a resurgence as a direct result of the immunisation threshold not being reached in an increasing number of countries. The decline in public confidence around the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is due to many reasons, but one significant contributing factor is the ‘anti-vaccination movement’ and its persistent spreading of false and misleading information on social media. The aim of this dissertation is two-fold: (1) develop an understanding of how a rapidly changing information environment has led to the emergence of a post-truth era in which the rational, evidence-based domain of healthcare is under assault from the anti-vaccination rhetoric of the MMR-autism controversy; (2) develop an understanding of how the post-factual characteristics of the vaccine debate are producing information pathologies of decision-making that are influencing the uptake of the MMR vaccine. This dissertation met both these research aims through a literature review and a case study that utilises document analysis. This research produced a number of key findings: the anti-vaccination movement and the dissemination of false and misleading information about the MMR vaccine has been exacerbated by the changing information environment through the increasing dominance of social media and the phenomenon of the ‘echo chamber’; the characteristics of the post-factual vaccine debate are based on fake science and an increasing contempt for expert knowledge that is driven by Web 2.0 technologies and post-truth thinking. The conclusion drawn from this research points to the development of information fluency and the evolution of digital literacy to help society recover its fluency and effectiveness at dealing with information that has largely been lost in the post-truth era

Design and Architecture of an Ontology-driven Dialogue System for HPV Vaccine Counseling

Speech and conversational technologies are increasingly being used by consumers, with the inevitability that one day they will be integrated in health care. Where this technology could be of service is in patient-provider communication, specifically for communicating the risks and benefits of vaccines. Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, in particular, is a vaccine that inoculates individuals from certain HPV viruses responsible for adulthood cancers - cervical, head and neck cancers, etc. My research focuses on the architecture and development of speech-enabled conversational agent that relies on series of consumer-centric health ontologies and the technology that utilizes these ontologies. Ontologies are computable artifacts that encode and structure domain knowledge that can be utilized by machines to provide high level capabilities, such as reasoning and sharing information. I will focus the agent’s impact on the HPV vaccine domain to observe if users would respond favorably towards conversational agents and the possible impact of the agent on their beliefs of the HPV vaccine. The approach of this study involves a multi-tier structure. The first tier is the domain knowledge base, the second is the application interaction design tier, and the third is the feasibility assessment of the participants. The research in this study proposes the following questions: Can ontologies support the system architecture for a spoken conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling? How would prospective users’ perception towards an agent and towards the HPV vaccine be impacted after using conversational agent for HPV vaccine education? The outcome of this study is a comprehensive assessment of a system architecture of a conversational agent for patient-centric HPV vaccine counseling. Each layer of the agent architecture is regulated through domain and application ontologies, and supported by the various ontology-driven software components that I developed to compose the agent architecture. Also discussed in this work, I present preliminary evidence of high usability of the agent and improvement of the users’ health beliefs toward the HPV vaccine. All in all, I introduce a comprehensive and feasible model for the design and development of an open-sourced, ontology-driven conversational agent for any health consumer domain, and corroborate the viability of a conversational agent as a health intervention tool

Representing vaccine misinformation using ontologies

Abstract Background In this paper, we discuss the design and development of a formal ontology to describe misinformation about vaccines. Vaccine misinformation is one of the drivers leading to vaccine hesitancy in patients. While there are various levels of vaccine hesitancy to combat and specific interventions to address those levels, it is important to have tools that help researchers understand this problem. With an ontology, not only can we collect and analyze varied misunderstandings about vaccines, but we can also develop tools that can provide informatics solutions. Results We developed the Vaccine Misinformation Ontology (VAXMO) that extends the Misinformation Ontology and links to the nanopublication Resource Description Framework (RDF) model for false assertions of vaccines. Preliminary assessment using semiotic evaluation metrics indicated adequate quality for our ontology. We outlined and demonstrated proposed uses of the ontology to detect and understand anti-vaccine information. Conclusion We surmised that VAXMO and its proposed use cases can support tools and technology that can pave the way for vaccine misinformation detection and analysis. Using an ontology, we can formally structure knowledge for machines and software to better understand the vaccine misinformation domain