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Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards their empowerment. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. Moreover, specific search engines/sites mostly work on medical literature and are built by hand. This paper analyses the possibility of providing the user with tailored web information by exploiting the web semantic capabilities and, in particular, those of schema.org and its healthlifesci extension. After presenting a short review of the main user requirements when searching for health information on the Internet, an analysis of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension is shown to understand the main properties and semantic capabilities in the health/medical domain. Finally, an initial mapping among user requirements and schema.org elements is presented in order to provide expert and non-expert user categories with web pages that satisfy their specific requirements.

Objective: The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, which facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations.Background: Understanding medical texts is a difficult task for laypeople. The comprehension of a medical text mainly requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her literacy level on the subject. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification (syntactical or lexical). The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additional information whereas our system provides the consumer terms alongside the original medical terms and also adds consumer explanations. Moreover, differently from other solutions, our system works with more languages. Methods:We have developed SIMPLE that is able to automatically: 1) identify medical terms by using medical vocabularies; 2) translate them into consumer terms through medical-consumer thesauri; 3) provide term explanations by using health-consumer dictionaries. SIMPLE can be used as a standalone web application or can it be embedded into common health platforms for real time identification and explanation of medical terms. At present, it works with English and Italian texts but can be easily extended to other languages. We have run subjective tests with both medical experts and non-experts as well as objective tests to verify the effectiveness of SIMPLE and its simplicity of use. Results:The subjective tests with non-experts indicate that SIMPLE was considered easy to use and responsive. The big majority of respondents confirmed that SIMPLE helped them in understanding medical texts and declared their willingness to continue using SIMPLE and to recommend it to other people. The subjective tests, conducted with medical experts on a set of Italian radiology reports, showed an agreement between SIMPLE and the experts, on the highlighted medical terms, that ranges between 74,05% and 81,16% as well as an agreement of around 60% on the consumer term translation.The objective tests showed that the consumer terms, provided by SIMPLE, are, on average, eighteen times more familiar than the relative medical terms so proving, once more, the effectiveness of SIMPLE in simplifying the medical terms. Conclusions:The performed tests demonstrate the effectiveness of SIMPLE, its simplicity of use and the willingness of people in continuing with its use. SIMPLE provides, with a good agreement level, the same information that medical experts would provide. Finally, the consumer terms are 'objectively' more familiar than the related technical terms and as a consequence, much easier to understand.

Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurusdictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a list of technical terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding explanations of the terms. In addition, we have built an online editor that allows to add new medical terms (with the related consumer information) and modify existing consumer terms and definitions. Furthermore, we have built some practical applications, on top of the medical vocabularythesaurus-dictionary, in order to facilitate the empowerment of patients, or non-experts in general. The applications are located at the data, information and knowledge levels of the 'knowledge pyramid' that, in our case, contains the empowerment at the top level.

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