A linguistic approach for self-perceived health state: A real study for diabetes disease

Abstract

The concept of life quality is a subjective feeling that only patient is able to define. The absence of disease is one of the determinants of well-being and life quality. Generally, self-perceived health status is measured by specific or generic questionnaires. The health information collected in the questionnaires is usually expressed by numerical values although the indicators evaluated are qualitative and subjective. This contribution proposes a linguistic approach where health information provided by patients is modelled by means of linguistic information in order to manage the uncertainty and subjectivity of such assessments. The contribution introduces a new model for measuring self-perceived health that can manage linguistic information and computes a final linguistic evaluation for each patient, applying an effective aggregation operator. A real case study is also presented to show the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed model in the case of diabetes disease.