Personal Health Information Recommender: implementing a tool for the empowerment of cancer patients

Nowadays, patients have a wealth of information available on the Internet. Despite the potential benefits of Internet health information seeking, several concerns have been raised about the quality of information and about the patient's capability to evaluate medical information and to relate it to their own disease and treatment. As such, novel tools are required to effectively guide patients and provide high-quality medical information in an intelligent and personalised manner. With this aim, this paper presents the Personal Health Information Recommender (PHIR), a system to empower patients by enabling them to search in a high-quality document repository selected by experts, avoiding the information overload of the Internet. In addition, the information provided to the patients is personalised, based on individual preferences, medical conditions and other profiling information. Despite the generality of our approach, we apply the PHIR to a personal health record system constructed for cancer patients and we report on the design, the implementation and a preliminary validation of the platform. To the best of our knowledge, our platform is the only one combining natural language processing, ontologies and personal information to offer a unique user experience.