Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People

Marco Alfano, Biagio Lenzitti, Davide Taibi, Markus Helfert

2020

Abstract

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 the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Alfano M., Lenzitti B., Taibi D. and Helfert M. (2020). Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People.In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE, ISBN 978-989-758-420-6, pages 205-216. DOI: 10.5220/0009576202050216

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ict4awe20,
author={Marco Alfano and Biagio Lenzitti and Davide Taibi and Markus Helfert},
title={Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE,},
year={2020},
pages={205-216},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009576202050216},
isbn={978-989-758-420-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE,
TI - Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People
SN - 978-989-758-420-6
AU - Alfano M.
AU - Lenzitti B.
AU - Taibi D.
AU - Helfert M.
PY - 2020
SP - 205
EP - 216
DO - 10.5220/0009576202050216