Symptom Checkers, Search Engines and Conversational Agents for Online Health Information Seeking

Speaker: Sebastian Cross
Host: A/Prof Guido Zuccon

Abstract: 

The focus of this research is the investigation of online health information seeking, specifically, information to assist in self-diagnosis and triage. This information seeking activity is called Consumer Health Search (CHS). Within this research, we attempt to investigate the current online systems used to provide this information to users with the goal of improving them. Seeking this information is achieved through numerous avenues: the major share is taken by search engines, but health-specific services like symptom checkers are increasingly being consulted. We first study how effective each of these systems was with respect to self-diagnosis and triaging tasks. Our results showed that both systems were lacking when providing health information to users. We, therefore, look to identify the positives from both symptom checkers and search engines. By identifying these attributes, we aim to utilize them in the investigation and development of a future system, which incorporates them within a conversational search setting in particular. The outcome of this investigation is to produce more reliable and safe health information for users when using Consumer Health Search (CHS) systems.

Biography: 

Sebastian Cross received his Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Queensland University of Technology in 2014 and Honours in 2016. He is part of IELAB at the University of Queensland. He has experience in online learning environments and learning analytics. 

Currently, Sebastian is working towards a PhD where his research covers medical health seeking systems, specifically conversationally driven systems.