6533b85efe1ef96bd12bfeb7

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people

Biagio LenzittiMarco AlfanoDavide TaibiMarkus Helfert

subject

Patient EmpowermentSettore ING-INF/05 - Sistemi Di Elaborazione Delle InformazioniHealth Information SeekingLanguage complexitySettore INF/01 - InformaticaProcess (engineering)Computer scienceCommunicationmedia_common.quotation_subjectUser RequirementsUser requirements documentStructured DataComprehensionWorld Wide WebSearch EngineWorld Wide WebSearch engineWork (electrical)HealthInformation retrievale-Health; Health Information Seeking; User Requirements; Language Complexity; Structured Data on the WebE-HealthWeb contentEmpowermentmedia_common

description

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.

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2020-05-20
http://doras.dcu.ie/24469/