Assisting Health Consumers While Searching the Web through Medical Annotations

Abstract

Health consumers usually face difficulties on their online searches, mainly because of the differences between terminologies used by laypeople and health professionals. This work presents a tool, HealthTranslator, available as a Google Chrome extension that intends to reduce this terminological gap while users are searching the Web for health information. HealthTranslator automatically annotates medical concepts in web documents, providing additional information, such as concept definition, related concepts and links to external references. The solution was evaluated regarding its: (a) performance - the document processing is done gradually, typically from the top to the bottom of the document and performance was not an issue raised by the users; (b) concept coverage - the solution was compared to a similar extension performing in English recognizing significantly more concepts. A comparison with a corpus of Portuguese documents manually annotated with medical concepts showed an average F-measure between 27% and 33%, depending on the type of concepts being recognized; (c) users' receptivity to HealthTranslator and its usability - many aspects were surveyed on a user study. In general, the extension has a good acceptance and users find it useful.