Human-Centered Adaptive Approaches for Health Information

Consumer Health Information Systems (CHIS) are indispensable in the modern healthcare system and fulfil many functions. User-centered evidence-based medical information for patients positively influences therapy success, consumer behaviour, and health-related cause-effect comprehension. Also, improved health literacy allows patients to better accept medical advice and shared decision- making. It helps to prevent misconceptions, mitigate cognitive biases, and improves doctor-patient communication. Today, CHIS exist in many forms, from posters and brochures to popular science publications and media reports. Also, (self-)curated medical information is abundant on the Internet in different forms, e.g., discussions, and commercially. In these systems, information is generally provided statically, i.e., the same medical content is presented to everyone. However, patients vary regarding previous knowledge and information needs, e.g., depending on gender, age, personality, perception, etc. Thus, our main research question and objective in this research group is: How can evidence-based medical knowledge, cognitive-psychological mechanisms, and novel interactive data visualizations be combined to form adaptive and interactive consumer health information systems, that take account of individual health information needs, and increase health literacy by providing a reliable source of medical knowledge? Based on an analysis of existing CHIS, cognitive foundations, and visualizations of medical and consumer data, in this project we research innovative concepts for advanced interactive, adaptive, personalized and visual CHIS (called A+CHIS). We will implement the new concepts in a testbed system, and evaluate them in stationary and mobile environments for effectiveness and efficiency. We are focusing our research on the case of diabetes mellitus. It is a complex disease, changing over time, and requiring adaption of patients and therapies, hence affected have a constant need for information. Improving information in this area has a major impact because diabetes is widespread. Besides diabetes, we expect the basic results of our project also be applicable to other medical information cases as well. The cutting-edge research of our project lies in introducing multi-dimensional adaptivity to the information provision for health information consumers, aiming for a better understanding of the meaning of the provided medical content. Our A+CHIS will adapt the kind of information, its level of detail, and the form of presentation (e.g., textually, diagrammatically, or with advanced information visualization) to the information need and situation of the consumer. Our system will be able to track the information need and its evolving over time, and hence support the consumer during different stages of the treatment. We contribute to evidence-based medical information, user adaption, interactive visual information displays, and cognitive psychology. The results of our project may provide an efficiency increase for the general medical system, and improve the health literacy. The project partners are The Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization (Graz University of Technology, Coordinator), the Institute of General Practice and Evidence-based Health Services Research (Medical University of Graz), and the Institute of Psychology (University of Graz), together with a renowned advisory board and international collaboration partners.