The available online health information varies widely depending on the level of quality, trustworthiness and readability, and often it is not customized to users’ needs. The aim of the study was to assess whether the previously identified impediments
to laypersons’ online searching for health-related information still apply to Europeans and the possible improvements IIA techniques could bring. These findings serve to develop a new retrieval system for various biomedical documents, KHRESMOI.
http://khresmoi.eu
Intelligent Information Access (IIA) Techniques for Online Health Information Search: A Survey of Non-Physicians
What are the most important characteristics of a search engine for you?
Conclusions:
Natalia Pletneva1, Lonneke van der Plas2, Célia Boyer1
(1) Health On the Net Foundation, (2) IMS – University of Stuttgart
[email protected], [email protected]
Difficulties:
Why do you think you could not find the answer?
385 Participants Target Audience: Methodology: Questionnaire Languages: Duration:
France 23%, Spain 14 %, USA 10 % Highly educated and Internet savvy
Non-physicians Online survey, convenience sampling
English, French, Spanish, German
March 9th to April 27th, 2011
6%
34%
51%
9% Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Often
Always (0%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
I was not sure how to formulate a search query
Too much search results, difficult to choose what is relevant
Search results do not help me to find an answer Always
Usually
About a half the time
Rarely
More information about KHRESMOI surveys
How often do you face situations where you cannot find the answer to a medical question in the Internet?
Wishlist and solutions:
Do you find these tools helpful? (TOP 10)
The goal of KHRESMOI is to offer only webpages that are from trustworthy
sources that have either been certified or stem from public institutions or
recognized sources. Most of the aims of KHRESMOI are supported by our
survey findings, i.e. provision of trustworthy content, readability level
customization, geographical and language customization, categorization of the
results, query formulation support and search for multimedia files. However,
survey results have also allowed us to add a few points in the agenda, such as
the integration of a medical thesaurus, relevant topic suggestion and 3D body
visualization. A wide range of NLP and IIA techniques are used to return results
that are customized and suitable to the user’s knowledge.
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Readability
Distracting Ads
Evaluation of the link for each search result
Poor organization of search results
Search results lack specificity
Lack of quality filter
Overload with information quantity
Quality and expliciteness/fullness of …
Questionable trustworthiness
Relevance of matches
Always Often Sometimes Rarely Never
Non-physicians: Physicians: Radiologists:
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Usability for smartphones and mobile …
Overall personal evaluation of the site
Speed
Easy-to-use / Simplicity
Trustworthness of results
Quality of description
Readability of results
Relevance of matches Very important
Important
Moderately Important
Of little importnace
Unimportant
0% 50% 100%
Automatic translation of results
Word cloud
Body 3D anatomy visualization
Suggested filling of query
Risk factors assessment tools
Spelling correction
Search of images
Advanced search (country, language, date range)
Suggested relevant topics
Medical dictionary/Thesaurus Very important
Important
Moderately Important
Of little importnace
Unimportant
0 50 100 150 200 250
Other
List of links (Google, Yahoo)
Summary of information derieved from different sources
All the links are categorized into the groups
What types of difficulties do you face when searching for health information? (TOP 10)
How the final answer of your search should be presented?
Of little importance
Of little importance
Project partners:
