On-Line Retrieval of Health Information Based on Language Complexity, Information Customization and Information Quality

Abstract. A patient, nowadays, acquires on-line health information mainly bymeans of a search engine. Generic search engines have been shown to be limitedand unsatisfactory, at times, because of their generic searches that overload userswith the amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide customizedinformation to different types of users. At the same time, specific search enginesmostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals thatare mainly useful for medical researchers and experts. As a consequence, the foundhealth information may or may not help a user (mainly a non-expert one) for afull comprehension of what he/she is looking for (e.g., a condition, a therapy or adrug). This may negatively affect his/her empowerment process and the interaction with healthcare professionals such as doctors. This work presents a customsearch engine, FACILE, that allows to overcome the limitations discussed aboveby facilitating finding and comprehension of on-line information and thus positively affecting the empowerment process and communication/interaction withhealthcare professionals. A user, both a medical expert or non-expert, can specifyhis/her information requirements in terms of language level, specific informationsearched, and information quality. FACILE will provide the links to the web pagesthat comply with such requirements. In particular, FACILE will provide links toweb pages with different language levels (simple or complex) and, for each link,the response page will show the requested specific information (condition, therapy,drug, etc.) and a graphical indication (0–5 stars) of the information quality.