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 “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

An Iconic Framework for Learning the Art of Programming

The integration of programming teachings, in all levels of education, highlights the need to acquire the art of programming for each individual student through versatile tools based on specific cognitive methods. Diversified linguistic metaphors have to be adopted by the developing frame, in order to highlight the qualities of each student. Therefore, a framework, oriented to learning the art of programming, must foster polychrome constructs representations, a number of data structures and an intuitive interfaces in order to make easier to understand the evolution of the algorithm that have to be developed. The following contribution will present a theoretical formalization of a framework for teaching and learning the art of programming and therefore its development will propose as a graph-based execution and iconic modular interfaces on the methodologies to be developed

U-Search: A meta engine for creation of knowledge paths on the web

[9] . The main limitations of those tools are the pertinence of found information with the user search (mainly for search engines) and the potential information overload due to the amount of found results. This is due to the inability of search tools to understand user specific needs and starting knowledge. Moreover, the Web has evolved towards the concept of collective participation to site contents and in Web 2.0 we find many environments oriented to information and knowledge sharing The understanding of user needs together with the evolution of the Web is bringing, as a natural consequence, to the development of new research fields that innovate the search strategies. For example, Natural Language Processing To this end, we consider different searcher categories such as a "basic searcher" who knows little about a topic and will look for more information, a "deep searcher" who will look for specific details on a topic that he/she already knows and a "wide searcher" who will look for expanding his/her knowledge domain with topics that are loosely related to the starting topic. The meta engine will suggest words and web pages correlated to each of those searcher categories thus creating new knowledge paths tailored to the real user needs

Characteristics and Subjective Evaluation of an Intelligent Empowering Agent for Health Person Empowerment

Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their health conditions and treatment options, self-manage them, and make informed choices. Currently, few stand-alone applications for patient empowerment exist and people/patients often go on the Web to search for health information. Such information is mainly obtained through generic search engines and it is often overwhelming, too generic, and of poor quality. Intelligent Empowering Agents (IEA) can filter such information and assist the user in the understanding of health information about specific complaints or health in general. We have designed and developed a first 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. The paper describes the IEA main characteristics and presents the results of subjective tests carried out to assess the effectiveness of the IEA. Twenty-eight Master students in Digital Health filled an online survey presenting questions on usability, user experience and perceived value. Most respondents found the IEA easy to use and helpful. They also felt that it would improve communication with their doctors

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 “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

An Online Multilingual Medical Vocabulary/Thesaurus/Dictionary (MED-VTD) for Facilitating Understanding of Medical Texts

Medical texts (e.g., reports and medicine leaflets) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, they are often read by health consumers or other medical professionals who do not have the same vocabularies and can have difficulties in text comprehension. Thus, to help a generic user in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary that he/she can easily look for finding the plain equivalent of any medical (technical) term and a definition of the term with the same kind of language. In this work, we present an online multilingual medical vocabulary/thesaurus/dictionary (MED-VTD) that helps the generic user in understanding any medical text written either in English or in Italian. To this end, we have built an integrated system that uses medical vocabularies for creating a list of medical (technical) terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating the technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding supplementary information on the terms. MED-VTD contains both English and Italian resources so that a translation of terms between the two languages can also be automatically performed. Moreover, other languages can easily be added providing that the related vocabularies, thesauri and dictionaries are available

An Automatic System for Helping Health Consumers to Understand Medical Texts

Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers, etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical (technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It processes online medical documents and provides health consumers with the needed information for their understanding. To this end, we use a medical vocabulary for finding the technical terms in the medical texts, a consumer health vocabulary (CHV) for translating the technical terms into their consumer equivalents and a health-consumer dictionary for finding supplementary information on the terms. We have built a prototype that processes Italian medical reports and uses infobuttons next to the technical terms for allowing easy retrieval of the desired information

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 “Three Amigos” 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 “Three Amigos” 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

Searching the internet for learning materials through didactic indicator

Internet offers a huge amount of didactic materials that can be used in creating new online courses. However, those materials need a deep analysis to understand their context and contents before their potential use. As a consequence, the search of didactic material in internet is often quite tedious and time consuming so the searcher usually limits his/her analysis to the first found web pages . To help users in finding efficiently and timely the most appropriate online materials, we have developed a system, called SAXEF (System for Automatic eXtraction of lEearning object Features), that is capable to automatically extract the didactic indicators (a sort of DNA) of any web page (or group of pages) found on internet. Moreover, we have developed an e-learning search engine, SaxSearch, around SAXEF. It allows the user to make requests in terms of didactic indicators and automatically browses the internet to find the web pages that best match the user requirements