50 research outputs found
Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a âhuman-to-machineâ
communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her
empowerment level and the âhuman-to-humanâ 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 ârightâ 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
Facilitating access to health web pages with different language complexity levels
The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of health information on the web so that users can easily and quickly find information based on their specific requirements. In particular, it allows different types of users to find health web pages with required language complexity levels. To this end, we first use the structured data contained in the web to classify health web pages based on different audience types such as, patients, clinicians and medical researchers. Next, we evaluate the language complexity levels of the different web pages. Finally, we propose a mapping between the language complexity levels and the different audience types that allows us to provide different types of users, e.g., experts and non-experts with tailored web pages in terms of language complexity
Provision of tailored health information for patient empowerment: an initial study
Search of ârightâ 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
Aerodynamic simulation strategies assessment for a FenestronÂź in hover flight
The FenestronŸ has a crucial anti-torque function and its sizing is a key point of the Helicopter design, especially regarding thrust and power predictions. This paper reports the investigations done on a full scale Dauphin FenestronŸ. The objectives are first to evaluate the influence of some numerical parameters on the performance of the FenestronŸ. Then the flow is analyzed for a high incidence pitche, for which the rotor blade can experience massive boundary layer separations. Simulations are carried out on a single blade passage model. Several parameters are benched, such as grid quality, numerical schemes and turbulence modeling. A comparison with test bench measurements is carried out to evaluate the capability of the numerical simulations to predict both global performance (thrust and power) and local flows (static pressure at the shroud and radial profiles inside the vein). The analysis demonstrates the capability of numerical simulations to accurately estimate the global performance of the FenestronŸ, including at high pitch angles. However, some discrepancies remain on the local flow, especially in the vicinity of the rotor shroud. A more detailed analysis of the local flow is performed at a blade pitch angle of 35°, with a particular interest for the blade tip region
Improving communication in risk management of health information technology systems by means of medical text simplification
Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of patient care while reducing costs. These systems have been developed in response to the changing models of care to an ongoing relationship between patient and care team, supported by the use of technology due to the increased instance of chronic disease. However, the use of HITS may increase the risk to patient safety and security. While standards can be used to address and manage these risks, significant communication problems exist between experts working in different departments. These departments operate in silos often leading to communication breakdowns. For example, risk management stakeholders who are not clinicians may struggle to understand, define and manage risks associated with these systems when talking to medical professionals as they do not understand medical terminology or the associated care processes. In order to overcome this communication problem, we propose the use of the âThree Amigosâ approach together with the use of the SIMPLE tool that has been developed to assist patients in understanding medical terms. This paper examines how the âThree Amigosâ approach and the SIMPLE tool can be used to improve estimation of severity of risk by non-clinical risk management stakeholders and provides a practical example of their use in a ten step risk management process
Network references for rare diseases: state of the art for the paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria
recently, healthcare network models have been proposed to improve general awareness of rare diseases for patients and specific knowledge about diagnosis, treatment, and management for healthcare services. Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) is a rare haematological disease that still has no framing in an official network.
OBJECTIVES:
to describe the use of network models in diagnosis, treatment, and management of PNH patients both in Italy and abroad and its impact on patients and healthcare service. DISEGN: literature search was performed using the keywords "Hemoglobinuria", "Network", "PHN", and "Screening" in both MedLine and EMBASE. Search was restricted to the articles published in the last 5 years and written in English, French or Italian language.
RESULTS:
from the total 251 articles of the initial search, only 21 were finally included in our review. None of the included study explicitly described a network model. In general, we were able to identify two different kind of networks implicitly described in the studies: laboratory networks for diagnostic harmonization or screening of the population at risk of PNH (10/21 studies) and PNH registry as network of clinical information to be use for better understanding of the natural history of the disease and to assess therapeutic effectiveness (11/21 studies).
CONCLUSIONS:
few network approaches in PNH diagnosis, treatment, and management are described in literature. Despite the scarce application of the networks, our review highlights the positive impact that networks have in both patients and healthcare services
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: a global intervention tournament in 63 countries
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventionsâ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behaviorâseveral interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on peopleâs initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors