Adapting Web-Based Information to the Needs of Patients with Cancer

摘要

Good patient education can help to reduce health service costs and improve the quality of life of people with chronic or terminal conditions. Adapting educational materials to the patients' needs and interests can make them more effective. Computer-based techniques make this adaptation more feasible. In this paper we describe a theoretically motivated framework for the provision of computer-based information for cancer patients, and the computational techniques used to implement it. Our goal is to develop an interactive hypertext system which could provide patients with the right information at the right time, avoiding some of the need to search through the copious literature available. The paper describes how we use an explicit model of relevance to select and present information that is adapted at different levels to the situational and process-based aspects of the patient's illness and treatment.