Exploring Patient Needs in Online Health Communities Using Text Mining--Taking Diabetes and Depression as Examples (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingfang Liu ◽  
Xiaoyan Jiang ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Yingyi Zhou

BACKGROUND Online Health Community (OHC) refers to a forum where patients, their family members, doctors and caregivers communicate with each other. Patients who participate in OHCs can obtain benefits for disease treatments and health management, so identifying the categories of patient needs and how they are satisfied are significant to determining theories of patient demand and community construction. OBJECTIVE (1) Explore the needs of patients in the Internet environment. (2) Distinguish the similarities and differences of patient needs among OHCs of different types and concerning different diseases. (3) Proposed a method for automatically identifying patient demands in Internet environments. METHODS This study used a combination of manual annotation and computer-aided method to mine value of 9936 posts collected from four OHCs in China. On one hand, we recruited 7 diabetes or depression medical experts to label text according to a theoretical framework, forming patient need theory in Internet environments, which is designed for the first two research goals. On the other hand, based on the corpus constructed by manual annotation, this research used Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to train a model for automatically identifying patient demands, which is planned to reach the third research purpose. RESULTS According to statistical results, the proportion of posts related to patient needs in OHCs was approximately 91%, and posts concerned with Emotional Support (18%), Information (28%) and Socialization (44%) needs were the top three most prevalent categories. However, when OHCs were divided according to user composition and disease type, patient needs were diverse: the chief demand was Socialization in Patient Interaction OHCs (65%), Diabetes OHCs (50%), and Depression OHCs (69%), while Information (96%) was the chief demand in Patient-Doctor Interaction OHCs. A model was trained to identify patient needs taking Linguistic Features (LF) and Category Keyword Features (CKF) as input and Random Forest as the classifier, of which the F1 value was higher than 0.80 on test set. CONCLUSIONS Patient needs in the Internet environment mainly include Emotional Support needs, Information needs and Socialization needs. Differences in community type and disease type can lead to diverse patient needs in OHCs. It is practical to use computer-aided methods to identify patient needs in OHCs automatically.

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-314
Author(s):  
Tim Rhodus ◽  
James Hoskins

This article examines opportunities for enhanced information access and dissemination available to professional horticulturists using the Internet. The intent, however, is not to provide a comprehensive cataloging of where and how to find various databases or sources for multimedia educational resources. While some of these resources are reviewed, the goals of this article are to provide a background of the Internet environment and to examine the communication impacts of the Internet on horticultural researchers and educators. Our view is that computer-aided communication is an opportunity challenge, which should be confronted by individual horticulturists and the discipline as a whole. Examples of these new resources that can have a positive impact on the accomplishment of work responsibilities of horticultural professionals are discussed.


Author(s):  
Shelagh K. Genuis

This qualitative paper explores how health information mediated by the internet and media is used and made valuable within the life of consumers managing non-crisis health challenges, and how informal information seeking and gathering influences self-positioning within patient-clinician relationships. Findings have implications for health information literacy and collaborative, patient-centred care.Cette étude qualitative explore comment l’information sur la santé relayée par Internet et les médias est utilisée et rendue utile dans le contexte de consommateurs gérant des problèmes médicaux non urgents, et comment la recherche et la collecte d’information informelles influencent l’auto-positionnement dans la relation patient clinicien. Les résultats ont des applications dans la maîtrise de l’information médicale et les soins collaboratifs centrés sur le patient.


Author(s):  
Radha Guha

Background:: In the era of information overload it is very difficult for a human reader to make sense of the vast information available in the internet quickly. Even for a specific domain like college or university website it may be difficult for a user to browse through all the links to get the relevant answers quickly. Objective:: In this scenario, design of a chat-bot which can answer questions related to college information and compare between colleges will be very useful and novel. Methods:: In this paper a novel conversational interface chat-bot application with information retrieval and text summariza-tion skill is designed and implemented. Firstly this chat-bot has a simple dialog skill when it can understand the user query intent, it responds from the stored collection of answers. Secondly for unknown queries, this chat-bot can search the internet and then perform text summarization using advanced techniques of natural language processing (NLP) and text mining (TM). Results:: The advancement of NLP capability of information retrieval and text summarization using machine learning tech-niques of Latent Semantic Analysis(LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Word2Vec, Global Vector (GloVe) and Tex-tRank are reviewed and compared in this paper first before implementing them for the chat-bot design. This chat-bot im-proves user experience tremendously by getting answers to specific queries concisely which takes less time than to read the entire document. Students, parents and faculty can get the answers for variety of information like admission criteria, fees, course offerings, notice board, attendance, grades, placements, faculty profile, research papers and patents etc. more effi-ciently. Conclusion:: The purpose of this paper was to follow the advancement in NLP technologies and implement them in a novel application.


Author(s):  
Shumin Shi ◽  
Dan Luo ◽  
Xing Wu ◽  
Congjun Long ◽  
Heyan Huang

Dependency parsing is an important task for Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, a mature parser requires a large treebank for training, which is still extremely costly to create. Tibetan is a kind of extremely low-resource language for NLP, there is no available Tibetan dependency treebank, which is currently obtained by manual annotation. Furthermore, there are few related kinds of research on the construction of treebank. We propose a novel method of multi-level chunk-based syntactic parsing to complete constituent-to-dependency treebank conversion for Tibetan under scarce conditions. Our method mines more dependencies of Tibetan sentences, builds a high-quality Tibetan dependency tree corpus, and makes fuller use of the inherent laws of the language itself. We train the dependency parsing models on the dependency treebank obtained by the preliminary transformation. The model achieves 86.5% accuracy, 96% LAS, and 97.85% UAS, which exceeds the optimal results of existing conversion methods. The experimental results show that our method has the potential to use a low-resource setting, which means we not only solve the problem of scarce Tibetan dependency treebank but also avoid needless manual annotation. The method embodies the regularity of strong knowledge-guided linguistic analysis methods, which is of great significance to promote the research of Tibetan information processing.


Designs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Eric Lazarski ◽  
Mahmood Al-Khassaweneh ◽  
Cynthia Howard

In recent years, disinformation and “fake news” have been spreading throughout the internet at rates never seen before. This has created the need for fact-checking organizations, groups that seek out claims and comment on their veracity, to spawn worldwide to stem the tide of misinformation. However, even with the many human-powered fact-checking organizations that are currently in operation, disinformation continues to run rampant throughout the Web, and the existing organizations are unable to keep up. This paper discusses in detail recent advances in computer science to use natural language processing to automate fact checking. It follows the entire process of automated fact checking using natural language processing, from detecting claims to fact checking to outputting results. In summary, automated fact checking works well in some cases, though generalized fact checking still needs improvement prior to widespread use.


2004 ◽  
Vol 184 (5) ◽  
pp. 448-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kenwright ◽  
Isaac M. Marks ◽  
Lina Gega ◽  
David Mataix-Cols

SummaryIn an open study, ten people with phobia or panic disorder who could not travel repeatedly to a therapist accessed a computer-aided exposure self-help system (Fear Fighter) at home on the internet with brief therapist support by telephone. They improved significantly, and their outcome and satisfaction resembled those in patients with similar disorders who used Fear Fighter in clinics with brief face-to-face therapist support.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 992-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina A Clarke ◽  
Joi L Moore ◽  
Linsey M Steege ◽  
Richelle J Koopman ◽  
Jeffery L Belden ◽  
...  

To synthesize findings from previous studies assessing information needs of primary care patients on the Internet and other information sources in a primary care setting. A systematic review of studies was conducted with a comprehensive search in multiple databases including OVID MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Scopus. The most common information needs among patients were information about an illness or medical condition and treatment methods, while the most common information sources were the Internet and patients’ physicians. Overall, patients tend to prefer the Internet for the ease of access to information, while they trust their physicians more for their clinical expertise and experience. Barriers to information access via the Internet include the following: socio-demographic variables such as age, ethnicity, income, education, and occupation; information search skills; and reliability of health information. Conclusion: Further research is warranted to assess how to create accurate and reliable health information sources for both Internet and non-Internet users.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
L.A. Regush ◽  
◽  
A.V. Orlova ◽  
E.V. Alekseeva ◽  
O.R. Veretina ◽  
...  

The purpose of the study was to justify the essence of the “Internet immersion” phenomenon and to create a standardized method for its measurement. A comparative analysis of approaches to human behavior on the Internet environment and existing diagnostic methods has revealed a significant variety of categories and definitions used. At the same time, there is no definition that: first, characterizes the degree and quality of user's Internet activity; second, is free from negative and clinical connotations; and, third, describes a wider time range of Internet usage than the actual state of immersion. The authors substantiate the possibility of studying the phenomenon of the Internet immersion through the category of disposition. It consists of the readiness to use technical means and informational resources of the Internet to solve problems in various types of activities and communication. The authors identify traditional components in the structure of the Internet immersion phenomenon. These are, first of all, a cognitive component, represented by digital competence self-assessment; then, an affective component, represented by motivation and emotional and value-based attitude towards the Internet; and a behavioral component, represented by the amount of digital consumption. Based on this definition, it was possible to construct a compact 9-block “Index of the Internet immersion” questionnaire. Its standardization was conducted on the sample of 712 adolescents, aged from 11 to 17. Using the factor analysis, the structure of the questionnaire was identified. The first factor includes questions that relate to the time spent on the Internet and signs of dependence on it. The second factor includes questions that reveal the activity component and emotional attitude to the Internet. The third factor includes questions about experience and self-assessment of digital competence. The advantage of the “Index of the Internet immersion” questionnaire is a fairly high reliability for internal consistency of scales throughout the questionnaire. We also confirmed the sufficient convergent validity of the “Internet environment immersion Index” method with the “Scale of Problematic Internet Usage” by A.A. Gerasimova, A.B. Kholmogorova (adapted version of Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale (GPIUS) by S. Caplan) and the Internet Addiction Test (IAT, K. Young), modified by V. A. Loskutova. This indicates its validity as an independent tool that does not duplicate other tools for semantically similar phenomena measurement. In the conditions of forced self-isolation that have developed in our country, the method of the Internet immersion diagnostics as an adequate and theoretically justified tool will allow us to study changes in the emotional state and behavior of teenagers on the Internet.


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