Context Aware Retrieval of Health Information on the Web

Abstract

Although search engines are a valuable tool to find information on the Web, sometimes it is hard for the users to find relevant and important information for them. This is often a result of traditional search engines' lack of awareness about the user's context. This becomes a very important issue when people search for health related information. In this paper we present a search tool that helps users to find relevant health information on the Web, using data from personal health records as context in order to deliver results that apply to the user's current conditions. We evaluated this tool with 18 subjects and results from such evaluation are discussed