Comparing Health Forums: User Engagement, Salient Entities, Medical Detail

Anna Guimarães, Erisa Terolli, Gerhard Weikum

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Health discussion forums provide valuable information about diseases, symptoms, treatments and risk factors from a patient perspective, and allow exchanging experiences and mutual support. This paper analyzes and compares three different forums, Health Boards, Patient and Reddit, using three major conditions as representative samples: blood pressure, depression and diabetes. The analysis investigates three principal dimensions: the intensity of user engagement, the explicit coverage of salient entities such as frequent symptoms or risk factors, and the degree of medical detail expressed by specific drugs and their dosages. We report on commonalities across the three forums and on key findings about how they differ in their contents and interactions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCSCW 2021 - Conference Companion Publication of the 2021 Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Pages57-61
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781450384797
DOIs
StatePublished - 23 Oct 2021
Event24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 23 Oct 202127 Oct 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Conference

Conference24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period23/10/2127/10/21

Keywords

  • Health informatics
  • Online health forums
  • Social Computing
  • Social Networks
  • Text tagging

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