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.
Lingua originale | English |
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Titolo della pubblicazione ospite | ICT4AWE 2020 - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health |
Pagine | 205-216 |
Numero di pagine | 12 |
Stato di pubblicazione | Published - 2020 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Computer Science Applications
- Health Informatics