Background Depression, as one of the most prevalent mental disorders, is expected to become a leading cause of disability. While evidence-based treatments are not always easily accessible, Internet-based information and self-help appears as a promising approach to improve the strained supply situation by avoiding barriers of traditional offline treatment. User experience in the domain of mental...

BACKGROUND Online technology is a promising resource for conducting clinical research. While the internet may improve a study's reach, as well as the efficiency of data collection, it may also introduce a number of challenges for participants and investigators. The objective of this research was to determine the challenges that potential participants faced during the enrollment phase of a rando...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Evaluate the reading difficulty of Spanish patient education materials using the validated Índice Flesch-Szigriszt (INFLESZ) and Spanish Lexile Analyzer, and to identify relationships between English and Spanish readability formulas. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis. METHODS All otolaryngology-related patient education articles written in Spanish from the health l...

To reverse the present stagnation in progress toward reduced smoking rates, new widely accessible treatment methods for smoking cessation must be developed and evaluated with large groups of smokers. We tested the feasibility of conducting a smoking cessation study over the Internet using a brief, self-help educational intervention. Through a direct e-mail sent from a large health information w...

This poster reports on the developmental phase of a new internet-based support services (ICSS) for Chinese caregivers of people with Alzheimer Disease (AD): a specialized email application and an informational website. Bilingual Chinese caregivers wanted internet-based information in both Chinese and English. Usability testing and heuristic evaluation results revealed that the interface success...

Even with advances in tourism information search technology, brochures are still popular information sources for tourists. The purpose of this paper is to describe tourist evaluations of a brochure, and to better understand how such evaluations influence visitation interest levels and actual visitation. A mail survey was conducted using a sample of individuals who requested travel information f...

Functional context for biological sequence is provided in the form of annotations. However, within a group of similar sequences there can be annotation heterogeneity in terms of coverage and specificity. This in turn can introduce issues regarding the interpretation of actual functional similarity and overall functional coherence of such a group. One way to mitigate such issues is through the u...

BACKGROUND To the general public, the Internet is an acceptable method of obtaining information. It also plays an important role in guiding patients and solving their problems. We investigated the clinical characteristics of an Internet website to provide guidelines and tips for consultation. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this retrospective observational study, we analyzed the use of a free public...

BACKGROUND Medical blogs have emerged as new media, extending to a wider range of medical audiences, including health professionals and patients to share health-related information. However, extraction of quality health-related information from medical blogs is challenging primarily because these blogs lack systematic methods to organize their posts. Medical blogs can be categorized according t...

The explosion in the use of Internet has contributed to arise a lot of web sites that offer many kind of services (products, information, etc). At the beginning the quality of these web sites was not too important because the most important fact was that people knew that there was a web site because there was not a big competence. But recently, there are many web sites related to the same topic...