Accurate readability assessment of health related materials is a critical first step in producing easily understandable consumer health information resources and personal health records. Existing general readability formulas may not always be appropriate for the medical/consumer health domain. We developed a new health-specific readability pilot measure, based on the differences in semantic and...

329 patients in a multi-cultural surgery in Nottinghamshire, England used a touch-screen health information kiosk in the practice and then filled in an online questionnaire after they had searched the system. This questionnaire sought background information on the patient’s age, gender, country of birth and employment status as well as data on the use and usefulness of the kiosk. Ease of kiosk ...

This paper presents an idealized conceptual framework for consumer health informatics research drawing from complementary disciplines: information science and health campaign research. This synthesis is designed to provide researchers with a flexible model to evaluate current research and inform future studies. Following a description of the major components, we describe a recent evaluation of ...

Consumer retrieval of health information through the internet has become prevalent. In the past, physicians provided filtered health information to the consumer. However, the availability of health related information including disease specific research trends over the World Wide Web is useful for clinicians and consumers. The use of internet based health care information by clinicians and cons...

BACKGROUND There is a growing interest concerning the potential of ICT solutions that are customized to consumers. This emerging discipline referred to as consumer health informatics (CHI) plays a major role in providing information to patients and the public, and facilitates the promotion of self-management. The concept of CHI has emerged out of the desire of most patients to shoulder responsi...

While interest in biomedical question answering has been growing, research in consumer health question answering remains relatively sparse. In this paper, we focus on the task of consumer health question understanding. We present a rule-based methodology that relies on lexical and syntactic information as well as anaphora/ellipsis resolution to construct structured representations of questions ...