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 by means of a search engine. Generic search engines have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory, at times, because of their generic searches that overload users with the amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide customized information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts. As a consequence, the found health information may or may not help a user (mainly a non-expert one) for a full comprehension of what he/she is looking for (e.g., a condition, a therapy or a drug). This may negatively affect his/her empowerment process and the interaction with healthcare professionals such as doctors. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that allows to overcome the limitations discussed above by facilitating finding and comprehension of on-line information and thus positively affecting the empowerment process and communication/interaction with healthcare professionals. A user, both a medical expert or non-expert, can specify his/her information requirements in terms of language level, specific information searched, and information quality. FACILE will provide the links to the web pages that comply with such requirements. In particular, FACILE will provide links to web 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.