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Updated: Jul 11, 2025

Evidence-based Knowledge Synthesis and Hypothesis Validation: Navigating Biomedical Knowledge Bases via Explainable AI and Agentic Systems
Published on: June 13, 2025
Digital Personal Health Coaching Platform for Promoting Human Papillomavirus Infection Vaccinations and Cancer
Nariman Ammar1,2,3, Olufunto A Olusanya1, Chad Melton1,4
1Center for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN, United States.
Background:
Health promotion can empower populations to gain more control over their well-being by using digital interventions that focus on preventing the root causes of diseases. Digital platforms for personalized health coaching can improve health literacy and information-seeking behavior, leading to better health outcomes. Personal health records have been designed to enhance patients' self-management of a disease or condition. Existing personal health records have been mostly designed and deployed as a supplementary service that acts as views into electronic health records.
Objective:
We aim to overcome some of the limitations of electronic health records. This study aims to design and develop a personal health library (PHL) that generates personalized recommendations for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine promotion and cancer prevention.
Methods:
We have designed a proof-of-concept prototype of the Digital Personal Health Librarian, which leverages machine learning; natural language processing; and several innovative technological infrastructures, including the Semantic Web, social linked data, web application programming interfaces, and hypermedia-based discovery, to generate a personal health knowledge graph.
Results:
We have designed and implemented a proof-of-the-concept prototype to showcase and demonstrate how the PHL can be used to store an individual's health data, for example, a personal health knowledge graph. This is integrated with web-scale knowledge to support HPV vaccine promotion and prevent HPV-associated cancers among adolescents and their caregivers. We also demonstrated how the Digital Personal Health Librarian uses the PHL to provide evidence-based insights and knowledge-driven explanations that are personalized and inform health decision-making.
Conclusions:
Digital platforms such as the PHL can be instrumental in improving precision health promotion and education strategies that address population-specific needs (ie, health literacy, digital competency, and language barriers) and empower individuals by facilitating knowledge acquisition to make healthy choices.
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