Studying How Health Literacy Influences Attention during Online Information Seeking

Health literacy affects how people understand health information and, therefore, should be considered by search engines in health searches. In this work, we analyze how the level of health literacy is related to the eye movements of users searching the web for health information. We performed a user study with 30 participants that were asked to search online in the context of three work task situations defined by the authors. Their eye interactions with the Search Results Page and the Result Pages were logged using an eye-tracker and later analyzed. When searching online for health information, people with adequate health literacy spend more time and have more fixations on Search Result Pages. In this type of page, they also pay more attention to the results' hyperlink and snippet and click in more results too. In Result Pages, adequate health literacy users spend more time analyzing textual content than people with lower health literacy. We found statistical differences in terms of clicks, fixations, and time spent that could be used as a starting point for further research. That we know of, this is the first work to use an eye-tracker to explore how users with different health literacy search online for health-related information. As traditional instruments are too intrusive to be used by search engines, an automatic prediction of health literacy would be very useful for this type of system

The interpersonal communication approach to HIV/AIDS prevention: strategies and challenges for faith-based organizations.

This study examines the interpersonal communication approach to HIV/AIDS prevention within Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) in Jamaica. Applying concepts from the social influence and social learning theories, the study examines communication strategies, challenges and concerns that religious leaders face in their communication efforts. Data gathered qualitatively through focus groups and in-depth interviews indicate that FBOs are social and cultural entities with potential to influence knowledge,attitude and behaviour for HIV/AIDS prevention. However, issues related to content, context, culture, the prevailing AIDS-related stigma alongside religious leaders’ personal characteristics hamper their communication initiatives. Capacity building of leaders as HIV/AIDS communicators and behaviour change facilitators and a collaborative effort between FBOs and health organizations would enhance their HIV/AIDS response

Introducing patient and dentist profiling and crowdsourcing to improve trust in dental care recommendation systems

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014. Healthcare blogs, podcasts, search engines and health social networks are now widely used, and referred as crowdsources, to share information such as opinions, side effects, medication and types of therapies. Although attitudes and perceptions of the users play a vital role on how they create, share, retrieve and utilise the information for their own or recommend to others, recommendation systems have not taken the attitudes and perceptions into considerations for matching. Our research aims at defining a trust dependent framework to design recommendation system that uses profiling and social networks in dental care. This paper focuses on trust derived in direct interaction between a patient and a dentist from subjective characteristics’ point of view. It highlights that attitudes, behaviours and perception of both patients and dentists are important social elements, which enhance trust and improve the matching process between them. This study forms a basis for our profile-based framework for dynamic dental care recommendation systems