OBJECTIVE Readability has been claimed to be an important factor for understanding texts describing health symptoms and medications. Such texts may be a factor which indirectly affects the health of the population. Despite the expertise of physicians, the readability of information sources may be important for acquiring essential treatment information. The aim of this study was to measure the r...

BACKGROUND Treatment for colorectal cancer (CRC) may result in physical, social, and psychological needs that affect patients' quality of life post-treatment. A comprehensive assessment should be conducted to identify these needs in CRC patients post treatment, however, there is a lack of tools and processes available in general practice. AIMS This study aimed to develop a patient-completed n...

BACKGROUND Patients increasingly use the internet to access health information. Inadequate health literacy is common and frequently limits patient comprehension of healthcare literature. We aimed to assess the readability of online consumer-orientated Parkinson's disease (PD) information using two validated measures. METHOD We identified the 100 highest ranked consumer-orientated PD webpages ...

Several sets of explanatory variables – including shallow, language modeling, POS, syntactic, and discourse features – are compared and evaluated in terms of their impact on predicting the grade level of reading material for primary school students. We find that features based on in-domain language models have the highest predictive power. Entity-density (a discourse feature) and POS-features, ...

Various search engines are available to clinical trial seekers. However, it remains unknown how comprehensible clinical trial eligibility criteria used for recruitment are to a lay audience. This study initially investigated this problem. Readability of eligibility criteria was assessed according to (i) shallow and lexical characteristics through the use of an established, generic readability m...

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Japan. A total of 805,236 new cases of cancer and 364,872 deaths from cancer were estimated in 2010 and 2013 (National Cancer Center, 2014). However, cancer screening rates in Japan are lower than those in Western countries. The screening rates for breast cancer in women aged 50-69 years and cervical cancer in women aged 20-69 years in 2010 were 80.4% and...

Researchers and practitioners frequently use readability formulas to predict the suitability of health-related texts for consumers (e.g., patient instructions, informed consent documents). However, the appropriateness of using readability formulas originally developed for students and educational texts for lay audiences and health-related texts remains to be validated. In this exploratory study...

Early primary children’s literature poses some interesting challenges for automated readability assessment: for example, teachers often use fine-grained reading leveling systems for determining appropriate books for children to read (many current systems approach readability assessment at a coarser whole grade level). In previous work (Ma et al., 2012), we suggested that the fine-grained assess...