Characterizing the Effect of Consumer Familiarity with Health Topics on Health Information Seeking Behavior

Despite the growth of Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) websites, searching for relevant health information remains a challenging task for most users, especially for the consumer of non-medical professionals. Most consumers only have vague idea and cannot describe their health situation clearly due to lack of medical knowledge; therefore consumers’ query keywords often do not accurately reflect their health information needs. The diversity of consumer familiarity with health topics also leads to frustration since the information presented may fall outside the consumer's comprehension level. This paper aims to investigate the effects of consumers’ familiarity on their health information seeking behavior. We conducted a user study with four health search tasks. This study analyzes several characteristics of search behavior, such as query keywords, query reformulation pattern, and search strategy. The query keywords submitted by the participants are classified into general and medical terminology by matching them with Consumer Health Vocabularies and Medical Subject Headings. The identification of query reformulation pattern addresses both syntax and semantic changes. The preliminary user study findings show that participants performed different query reformulation patterns for the familiar and non-familiar tasks. For future research, the findings from this study will be used to build an adaptive CHI system.