Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, Hallym University of Graduate Studies, HUGS Center for Hearing and Speech Research, Seoul 06157, Korea.
College of Business and Economics, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain 15551, UAE.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Aug 27;17(17):6209. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17176209.
Hearing loss is the most common human sensory deficit, affecting normal communication. Recently, patients with hearing loss or at risk of hearing loss are increasingly turning to the online health community for health information and support. Information on health-related topics exchanged on the Internet is a useful resource to examine patients' informational needs. The ability to understand the patients' perspectives on hearing loss is critical for health professionals to develop a patient-centered intervention. In this paper, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on electronic patient-authored questions on social question-and-answer (Q&A) sites to identify patients' perceptions, concerns, and needs on hearing loss. Our results reveal 21 topics, which are both representative and meaningful, and mostly correspond to sub-fields established in hearing science research. The latent topics are classified into five themes, which include "sudden hearing loss", "tinnitus", "noise-induced hearing loss", "hearing aids", "dizziness", "curiosity about hearing loss", "otitis media" and "complications of disease". Our topic analysis of patients' questions on the topic of hearing loss allows achieving a thorough understanding of patients' perspectives, thereby leading to better development of the patient-centered intervention.
听力损失是最常见的人类感觉缺陷，影响正常交流。最近，听力损失或有听力损失风险的患者越来越多地转向在线健康社区获取健康信息和支持。互联网上交换的与健康相关的信息是检查患者信息需求的有用资源。了解患者对听力损失的看法对于健康专业人员制定以患者为中心的干预措施至关重要。在本文中，我们应用潜在狄利克雷分配（LDA）对社交问答（Q&A）网站上的电子患者撰写的问题进行分析，以确定患者对听力损失的看法、关注点和需求。我们的结果揭示了 21 个主题，这些主题既具有代表性又有意义，并且主要与听力科学研究中确立的子领域相对应。潜在主题分为五个主题，包括“突发性听力损失”、“耳鸣”、“噪声性听力损失”、“助听器”、“头晕”、“对听力损失的好奇”、“中耳炎”和“疾病并发症”。我们对患者关于听力损失主题的问题进行主题分析，从而深入了解患者的观点，进而更好地制定以患者为中心的干预措施。
