Question

What are the key elements of a health recommender system? How are these different from traditional recommender systems such as used by Amazon and Netflix?

Answer 1

In the modern digital world, people have health information seeking behavior for which they rely on internet and other online resources. Due to this patients have become active participants in the decision making. These information that is available on online sources are vast, scattered, overloaded and irrelevant at times. The use of medical abbreviations also hinders the understanding of a layman regarding medical information. So these information do not foster a health decision making. To overcome this weakness, the health recommender system has been developed. It contains context related high quality content which helps the individual to get easily accessible and easily understandable health information. The key elements of the health recommender system is :

• It contains highly relevant medical information.
• The data available is of a simple language that can be easy understood by layman.
• It is a centralized approach to the health information thus saves the time and efforts.
• The content is scientifically proven, and non confidential.
• It reduces the effects of information overload.
• Limited user information is required to provide information.

The traditional recommender system is a subclass of information filtering system. It is mainly based on the persons interest which utilizes the user past behavoir and the characteristics of the content or item of purchase. It requires large user information to make accurate recommendations. These system mainly focus on recommending products of daily use, movies, TV shows, health related products etc. They specify the quality and characteristic contents of these products. But it do not provide information about a health related event, diseases treatment etc. The health recommender system basically focus on providing health related information which will assist them in making decision about their health course. whereas the traditional recommender system recommends the products or contents which can be used for better health.