Search results for "Patient empowerment"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people
2020
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…
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…
Development and Practical Use of a Medical Vocabulary-Thesaurus-Dictionary for Patient Empowerment
2018
Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a…
Provision of tailored health information for patient empowerment: An initial study
2019
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 sch…
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…
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…
On-Line Retrieval of Health Information Based on Language Complexity, Information Customization and Information Quality
2021
Abstract. A patient, nowadays, acquires on-line health information mainly by means of a search engine. Generic search engines have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory, at times, because of their generic searches that overload users with the amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide customized 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. As a consequence, the found health information may or may not help a user (mainly a non-expert one) for a full comprehension of what he/she is looking for (e.g.,…
Telemedicine in the treatment of patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
2017
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic and relapsing disorder with significant medical, social and financial impacts. IBD patients require continuous follow-up, and healthcare resource use in this context increases over time. In the last decade, telemedicine has influenced the treatment of chronic diseases like IBD via the application of information and communication technologies to provide healthcare services remotely. Telemedicine and its various applications (telemanagement, teleconsulting and tele-education) enable closer follow-up and provide education resources that promote patient empowerment, encouraging treatment optimisation over the entire course of the disease. We describ…
An automatic system for helping health consumers to understand medical texts
2015
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 …
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…