Nakikj Drashko, Mamykina Lena
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2017 Feb 10;2016:944-953. eCollection 2016.
An increasing number of individuals turn to online health communities (OHC) for information, advice and support about their health condition or disease. As a result of users' active participation, these forums store overwhelming volumes of information, which can make access to this information challenging and frustrating. To help overcome this problem we designed a discussion visualization tool DisVis. DisVis includes features for overviewing, browsing and finding particular information in a discussion. In a between subjects study, we tested the impact of DisVis on individuals' ability to provide an overview of a discussion, find topics of interest and summarize opinions. The study showed that after using the tool, the accuracy of participants' answers increased by 68% (p-value = 0.023) while at the same time exhibiting trends for reducing the time to answer by 38% with no statistical significance (p-value = 0.082). Qualitative interviews showed general enthusiasm regarding tools for improving browsing and searching for information within discussion forums, suggested different usage scenarios, highlighted opportunities for improving the design of DisVis, and outlined new directions for visualizing user-generated content within OHCs.
越来越多的人转向在线健康社区（OHC），以获取有关其健康状况或疾病的信息、建议和支持。由于用户的积极参与，这些论坛存储了海量信息，这使得获取这些信息变得具有挑战性且令人沮丧。为帮助克服这一问题，我们设计了一种讨论可视化工具DisVis。DisVis包括用于在讨论中进行概述、浏览和查找特定信息的功能。在一项受试者间研究中，我们测试了DisVis对个人概述讨论、找到感兴趣的主题并总结观点能力的影响。研究表明，使用该工具后，参与者答案的准确率提高了68%（p值=0.023），同时有将回答时间减少38%的趋势，但无统计学意义（p值=0.082）。定性访谈显示，人们对改善论坛内信息浏览和搜索的工具普遍充满热情，提出了不同的使用场景，强调了改进DisVis设计的机会，并概述了在在线健康社区中可视化用户生成内容的新方向。
