Social Networking and Dental Care: State of the Art and Analysis of the Impact on Dentists, Dental Practices and their Patients

Health Social networking sites offering search, reviews and recommendation are gaining popularity. This paper reviews the most popular social networking sites related to dental care. Social networks such as DrOogle and Yelp enable their users to review and rate their dentists and dental practices. Such information is then used to rank and recommend dentists or dental practices to new users/patients. This paper compares the dental care social networking sites in terms of their features and criteria supported for search, reviews and recommendations of dentists or dental practices. Mismatches between features and criteria among different dental care reviews sites are identified, which may cause inconsistency in the recommendations in the dental care. Therefore, this paper proposes a new framework for dynamic dental care recommendation system which takes both local (personalised) and global (crowdsourced) trust into account. It analyses the impact of current social networks on dentists, dental practices and their patients. Finally, it identifies the open issues and challenges that need to be addressed to design a trustworthy recommendation system for both the dental professionals and their patients.