Search results for "Patient empowerment"

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 multilingu…

The Internet as an additional source of Information on rare illness. A Facebook support group for parents of children with craniosynostosis as a case…

2020

Introduction Empirical studies show that belonging to a support group contributes to patient and caretaker empowerment. They also show that support groups significantly help parents and caretakers of ill children reduce stress and better handle the illness. Aim The aim of the study is to expand knowledge of how social media support groups function, and what impact they have on members. Material and methods Data was collected using online surveys conducted on 54 respondents. Results and discussion In particular, the respondents experienced empowerment in terms of ‘exchanging information’ and ‘finding recognition.’ Thanks to the online group, they felt better prepared to meet with their docto…

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

2022

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 prototy…

Proposed use of a conversational agent for patient empowerment

2021

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 wit…

The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Radiology Field: What Is the State of Doctor–Patient Communication in Cancer Diagnosis?

2023

Simple Summary Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used in radiology to improve diagnostic procedures over the past decades. The application of AI at the time of cancer diagnosis also creates challenges in the way doctors should communicate the use of AI to patients. The present systematic review deals with the patient's psycho-cognitive perspective on AI and the interpersonal skills between patients and physicians when AI is implemented in cancer diagnosis communication. Evidence from the retrieved studies pointed out that the use of AI in radiology is negatively associated with patient trust in AI and patient-centered communication in cancer disease. Background: In the past…

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

2023

AbstractMost 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, c…

Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding

2020

Abstract Objective The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. Background The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additi…

Telemedicine Follow Up of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Integrated into a Patient-Centered Health Care Team-Setting Impacts on Patient Empowe…

2017

Health care services are facing challenges with a growing ageing population prone to chronic conditions and multi-morbidities. Telemedicine applications have the potential to enhance patient’s safety at home by monitoring of chronic diseases, promoting coping and independence. The research project Patients and Professionals in Productive Teams aims to study patient-centered teamwork across organizational borders, supported by technology. This paper describes the research agenda for a study on how telemedicine follow-up impacts on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients’ quality of life and possible effects on patient empowerment, in the health region of Southern Norway. The outcome i…

The Health Challenges at Menopause and Midlife: Sustainability, ICT Technology and Patient Empowerment

2017

The implementation of lifestyle is a most cost-effective approach to the management of menopause. Physical activity, for example, may be an appropriate measure to reduce the risk of osteoporosis and other non-communicable diseases affected by menopause. The difficulty with physical activity and other lifestyle measures is often the poor long-term adherence. There are several studies addressing the issue and describing the main variables that impact adherence. Both changes in the strategy, activity program, or even behavioural changes supported by psychological techniques, have been demonstrated to have an impact, though still limited.

Language complexity in on-line health information retrieval

2020

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 in-formation 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 li…