An ontology based approach to the provision of personalized patient education

Abstract

Current approaches to patient education provide standardized materials to all patients regardless of their demographics and abilities. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this approach may suffer from a patient’s motivation to fully engage with the material. To alleviate these concerns this study proposes a personalized approach to patient education that is tailored to the individual characteristics and health objectives of the patient. Personalized features will enhance the comprehensibility and usability of the process of medical education. Taking this into consideration, this paper introduces a conceptual framework to create web based personalized patient education. A central component of this architecture comprises ontological models of the patient, medical conditions and the educational components. Use case scenarios are also provided to highlight the effectiveness of personalized education provision.