Citizens are increasingly using Internet-based resources to obtain and understand health information at the point of need. The ability to locate, evaluate and use online health information may be influenced by an individual's level of health literacy and eHealth literacy. Those with advanced eHealth literacy skills may utilise more efficient online search strategies and identify higher quality health information resources. This paper describes a study which investigated the associations between health literacy, eHealth literacy and actual online health information seeking behavior. Accurately quantifying online health information seeking behavior can be difficult, which is why we integrated software into the web browser to objectively monitor online interactions, search queries and Uniform Resource Locators. We recruited 54 participants to search for information related to common health topics. We received 307 answers, of which 75.2% were correct. However, despite having adequate health and eHealth literacies, participants relied on search engine results as a guide to locating information resources. Furthermore 96.3% of participants utilised unaccredited health information to answer some questions. The findings suggest that eHealth literate individuals may not always utilise effective online searching strategies. Pearson's product-moment correlation indicated that the relationship between the health and eHealth literacy scores was not statistically significant.

Current approaches to patient education provide generic standardized materials to all patients regardless of their demographics such as age and cognitive abilities. Thus, 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 architecture to create a web-based personalized patient education experience. A key component of this architecture comprises ontological models of the patient themselves, their medical conditions, physical activities and their educational attainments. Furthermore, rule-based reasoning is also proposed to achieve this personalization. A use case scenario is provided to highlight the effectiveness of personalized education provision.Susan Quinn received an MSc in Computing from the University of Ulster. She is currently working towards a PhD at the University of Ulster and is a member of the

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Ontologies are often used in biomedical and health domains to provide a concise and consistent means of attributing meaning to medical terminology. While they are novices in terms of ontology engineering, the evaluation of an ontology by domain specialists provides an opportunity to enhance its objectivity, accuracy, and coverage of the domain itself. This paper provides an evaluation of the viability of using ontology engineering novices to evaluate and enrich an ontology that can be used for personalized diabetic patient education. We describe a methodology for engaging healthcare and information technology specialists with a range of ontology engineering tasks. We used 87.8% of the data collected to validate the accuracy of our ontological model. The contributions also enabled a 16% increase in the class size and an 18% increase in object properties. Furthermore, we propose that ontology engineering novices can make valuable contributions to ontology development. Application-specific evaluation of the ontology using a semantic-web-based architecture is also discussed.

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