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

Nataly.Pletneva@HealthOnNet.org, Celia.Boyer@HealthOnNet.org

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: