Challenges and opportunities of using recommender systems for personalized health education

The use of computers in health education started more than a decade ago, mainly for tailoring health educational resources. Nowadays, many of the computer-tailoring health education systems are using the Internet for delivering different types of health education. Traditionally, these systems are designed for a specific health problem, with a predefined library of educational resources. These systems do not take advantage of the increasing amount of educational resources available on the Internet. One of the reasons is that the high availability of content is making it more difficult to find the relevant one. The problem of information overload has been addressed for many years in the field of recommender systems. This paper is focused on the challenges and opportunities of merging recommender systems with personalized health education. It also discusses the usage of social networks and semantic technologies within this approach.