A study of web usability for older adults seeking online health resources

Becker, Shirley Ann

doi:10.1145/1035575.1035578

Cited by 200 publications

(160 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The latest fad is always brought to appointments.^-Diabetes Dietician Furthermore, because of the amount of data associated with the conditions, our participants suggested that it is possible that patients can get overwhelmed with the amount of medical information available to them and they may not understand the medical language. Becker (2004) concluded that many online health resources would require a college education to understand the medical information. This was similarly noted by one clinician who discussed an online health management system aimed to educate and inform patients, which ultimately failed because of the overwhelming amount of information on the site.…”

Section: Medical Information Sources Are Not Adequate For Validating mentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning to Peers: Integrating Understanding of the Self, the Condition, and Others’ Experiences in Making Sense of Complex Chronic Conditions

O’Kane

Park

Mentis

et al. 2016

Comput Supported Coop Work

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Abstract. People are increasingly involved in the self-management of their own health, including chronic conditions. With technology advances, the choice of self-management practices, tools, and technologies has never been greater. The studies reported here investigated the information seeking practices of two different chronic health populations in their quest to manage their health conditions. Migraine and diabetes patients and clinicians in the UK and the US were interviewed about their information needs and practices, and representative online communities were explored to inform a qualitative study. We found that people with either chronic condition require personally relevant information and use a broad and varied set of practices and tools to make sense of their specific symptoms, triggers, and treatments. Participants sought out different types of information from varied sources about themselves, their medical condition, and their peers' experiences of the same chronic condition. People with diabetes and migraine expended great effort to validate their personal experiences of their condition and determine whether these experiences were 'normal'. Based on these findings, we discuss the need for future personal health technologies that support people in engaging in meaningful and personalised data collection, information seeking, and information sharing with peers in flexible ways that enable them to better understand their own condition.

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Section: Medical Information Sources Are Not Adequate For Validating mentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning to Peers: Integrating Understanding of the Self, the Condition, and Others’ Experiences in Making Sense of Complex Chronic Conditions

O’Kane

Park

Mentis

et al. 2016

Comput Supported Coop Work

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“…Utilizando as recomendações geradas pelo NIA, Becker [22] realizou um estudo de usabilidade por meio da avaliação de 125 sites web com conteúdos sobre saúde. A autora concluiu que a maioria dos sites avaliados não é amigável para o público da terceira idade, apontando como os maiores problemas encontrados: a falta de tratamento do tamanho das letras, a necessidade de destreza com o mouse para utilização dos menus de opções e a ausência de páginas de ajuda e mapas do conteúdo.…”

Section: Usabilidade Para a Terceira Idadeunclassified

Aspectos de usabilidade de mobile learning voltado para usuários com restrições decorrentes da idade

Carneiro

Ishitani²

2014

Revista Brasileira De Computação Aplicada

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Resumo: A tendência de envelhecimento da população mundial provocou um crescimento no nú-mero de pessoas na faixa de idade acima de 60 anos, também conhecida por terceira idade. Essas pessoas necessitam atualizar seus conhecimentos na tentativa de se manterem ativas e inseridas na sociedade. Nesse contexto, a educação a distância (EaD) apresenta-se como uma alternativa interessante, oferecendo conteúdo por meio da internet, com flexibilidade de hora e local de uso. Os dispositivos móveis facilitam o acesso a recursos de aprendizagem, todavia, os aplicativos requerem adaptações para as pessoas da terceira idade que, em geral, possuem uma ou mais restrições decorrentes da idade. Com o objetivo de avaliar a aderência dessas tecnologias ao grupo de pessoas da terceira idade, foram realizados testes de usabilidade com esse público na utilização de dispositivos móveis com um material previamente preparado. Foram identificados alguns aspectos relevantes para o público da terceira idade, bem como recomendações de melhorias no desenvolvimento de conteúdo. Foi também percebida grande aderência dos dispositivos selecionados ao público da terceira idade, sendo 9 dos 11 participantes os que manifestaram interesse no uso dessas tecnologias.Palavras-chave: Mobile learning. Terceira idade. Usabilidade. Abstract:The global trend of population aging has led a growth in the number of people over 60 years. These people need to update their knowledge and capabilities to remain active and inserted in the society. In this context, e-learning is an interesting alternative, offering relevant content through the Internet, anywhere and anytime. Mobile devices provide access to learning resources, however, they require adjustments to bring all these technological advances to the older people, who, in general, has one or more restrictions due to ageing. Aiming to evaluate the adherence of these technologies to the seniors, usability tests were conducted with this audience based on the use of mobile devices with a previously prepared material. It was identified relevant usability aspects to this public as well as recommendations for improvements in content development. Results pointed that 9 people among 11 interviewed manifested great interest in using these technologies.Keywords: Elderly. Mobile learning. Usability. IntroduçãoSegundo estatísticas do último censo do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) [1], a proporção da população brasileira acima de 60 anos cresceu de 8,60% em 2002 para 11,00% em 2010. Essa tendência de envelhecimento da população é global. Por isso, cada vez mais indivíduos acima de 60 anos necessitarão atualizar seus conhecimentos e adquirir novas competências para se manterem ativos e inseridos no contexto social.Paralelamente a essas mudanças, as tecnologias embarcadas nos dispositivos móveis vêm ganhando espaço e mudando o cenário dos meios de comunicação e, consequentemente, de áreas como a educação. A partir dos dispositivos móveis, novas áreas de estudo como a aprendizagem móvel ou mobile learnin...

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“…For example, Becker reported that the majority of health Web sites are not well designed for the elderly [21], while Stossel et al found that health education material on the Web is not written at an adequate reading level [18]. Zheng and Yu have reported on the readability of electronic health records compared to Wikipedia pages related to diabetes and found that readability measures often do not align with user ratings of readability [22].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These measures generally rely on surface-level characteristics of text, such as characters, syllables and word counts (missing citation). While these measures have been widely used in studies investigating the understandability of health content retrieved by search engines (e.g., [4,5,6,7,8,9,18,21]), our preliminary work found that these measures are heavily affected by the methods used to extract text from the HTML source [13]. We were able to identify specific settings of an HTML preprocessing pipeline that provided consistent estimates, but due to the lack of human assessments, we were not able to investigate how well each HTML preprocessing pipeline correlated with human assessments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consumer Health Search on the Web: Study of Web Page Understandability and Its Integration in Ranking Algorithms (Preprint)

Palotti¹,

Zuccon²,

Hanbury³

2018

Preprint

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Background: Understandability plays a key role in ensuring that people accessing health information are capable of gaining insights that can assist them with their health concerns and choices. The access to unclear or misleading information has been shown to negatively impact on the health decisions of the general public. Objective:We investigated methods to estimate the understandability of health Web pages and used these to improve the retrieval of information for people seeking health advice on the Web. Methods:Our investigation considered methods to automatically estimate the understandability of health information in Web pages, and it provided a thorough evaluation of these methods using human assessments as well as an analysis of preprocessing factors affecting understandability estimations, and associated pitfalls. Furthermore, lessons learnt for estimating Web page understandability were applied to the construction of retrieval methods with specific attention to retrieving information understandable by the general public. Results:We found that machine learning techniques were more suitable to estimate health Web page understandability than traditional readability formulae, which are often used as guidelines and benchmarking by health information providers on the Web (larger difference found for Pearson correlation of .602 using Gradient Boosting regressor compared to .438 using SMOG Index with CLEF 2015 collection). Learning to rank effectively exploited these estimates to provide the general public with more understandable search results ( H RBP ¿ reached 29.20, 22% higher than a BM25 baseline and 13% higher than the best system at CLEF 2016, both P≤ .001 ).

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A study of web usability for older adults seeking online health resources

Cited by 200 publications

References 12 publications

Turning to Peers: Integrating Understanding of the Self, the Condition, and Others’ Experiences in Making Sense of Complex Chronic Conditions

Turning to Peers: Integrating Understanding of the Self, the Condition, and Others’ Experiences in Making Sense of Complex Chronic Conditions

Aspectos de usabilidade de mobile learning voltado para usuários com restrições decorrentes da idade

Consumer Health Search on the Web: Study of Web Page Understandability and Its Integration in Ranking Algorithms (Preprint)

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