An Intelligent Empowering Agent (IEA) to Provide Easily Understood and Trusted Health Information Appropriate to the User Needs

Most members of the public, including patients, usually obtain health information from Web searches using generic search engines, which is often overwhelming, too generic, and of poor quality. Although patients may be better informed, they are often none the wiser and not empowered to communicate with medical professionals so that their care is compatible with their needs, values, and best interests. Intelligent Empowering Agents (IEA) use AI to filter medical information and assist the user in the understanding of health information about specific complaints or health in general. We have designed and developed a prototype of an IEA that dialogues with the user in simple language, collects health information from the Web, and provides tailored, easily understood, and trusted information. It empowers users to create their own comprehensive and objective opinion on health matters that concern them. This paper describes the IEA main characteristics and presents the results of subjective and objective tests carried out to assess the effectiveness of the IEA

Provision of tailored health information for patient empowerment: An initial study

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 health-lifesci 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

Prey-Predator Strategies in a Multiagent System

This paper describes the prey-predator multiagent system which can be considered as an abstraction of more complex real-world models. Both the prey and the predators are considered as autonomous agents with their own behaviors and perception of the environment In particular, we propose a simulator which lets study different strategies such as cooperation and individualism. An extensive experiment has been carried out in order to prove the effectiveness of the latter

E-LEARNING AND ART OF PROGRAMMING: A CONTEXT ORIENTED TO

In the studies for methods of coding, students have a great problem for understanding how to solve and to develop an algorithm in a rational way. This paper introduces the kernel of a framework able to running in the web space and useful to integrate a number of collaborative contexts for teaching and learning in a workroom hosted in different academic sites. This framework is in accordance to a blended approach in which students and teacher are cooperating to. Description: Coding or programming is very important for many tasks and this is true not only in the computer science area. A number of skills have to be acquired before to have a high familiarity degree with this science. The expertise on how to solve and to develop algorithms are the most difficulties for students in whatever age. In the last decade, a set of tools, based on flow chart representation of algorithms, have been developed to support teaching and learning such as: Scratch, Raptor, ect. These tools have different characteristics, someone are devoted to desktop applications others to the web, other ones are stand-alone, others can be used in a sharing approach. This paper introduces the kernel of a framework, supported by different devices and browsers, which is useful to teach and learn in a collaborative workroom and in different sites. The framework is a tool to teach and learn the art of programming. It uses a set of visual objects to define the owner program, and to understand how to solve and develop the owner algorithms. Firstly, it works in a collaborative way and with a distributed approach. Therefore, while a user creates a collection of visual objects, the system develops a text code and its association, so all parts of the diagram will be associated to a text code. A person, normally a teacher, will handled the framework in order to create a sequence of visual instructions or objects. Moreover, the teacher is able to define which students have to be windowed on the web and able to follow the activities. From the student viewpoint, it can link owner job to the web application framework, it can see its and others changes in the web workroom in real time and in interact way. From the teacher landscape, it can define the modality of any lesson: traditional, collaborative, associative, and it can register the student on each classes. Therefore, the kernel has several desirable features: concreteness, immediacy, clarity, visual feedback, easy to use, easy to e-learning, thus real applications can be developed using it. Html5, Css, Javascript, Php and Apache have been used to develop the kernel, whereas Node.js, Express.js and Socket.io for the communication. Therefore, it can be defined such an Open Source application. This framework will join several proprieties for e-learning in a workroom approach, it works in collaborative and associative way, and it is useful for lessons, exercises and exams, too. The web technologies allow to assign several exercises to students and teacher can see what the students are developing or collaborating. References: [1] N. Kiesler, Teaching Programming 201 with Visual Code Blocks Instead of VI, Eclipse or Visual Studio - experiences and potential use cases for higher education, Proc. of EDULEARN\u201916, July 04-06, 2016 - Barcellona, Spain [2] M.C. Carlisle, T.A. Wilson, J.W. Humphries, S.M. Hadfield, RAPTOR: introducing programming to non-majors with flowcharts, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, April 2004, Vol. 19 (4)

Language complexity in on-line health information retrieval

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

Proposed use of a conversational agent for patient empowerment

Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their conditions and treatment options, make informed choices and self-manage their health conditions in daily life, in collaboration with medical professionals. Conversational Agents in healthcare could play an important role in the process of empowering a person but, so far, they have been seldom been used for this purpose. This paper presents the basic principles and preliminary implementation of a conversational health agent for patient empowerment. It dialogues with the user in a “natural” way, collects health data from heterogeneous sources and provides the user with specific and relevant information. This allows a person/patient to create his/her own opinion on health matters in the most complete and objective way, and, therefore, it facilitates the empowerment process