At present, only the United States and New Zealand allow direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicine. In other countries where DTCA is not allowed, including Australia and the United Kingdom, pharmaceutical companies undertake disease awareness advertising (DAA). In DAA, advertisements do not name a drug directly, but provide general information about diseases and treatments,...

One of the challenges facing today’s information consumer is how to find information that meets their personal needs, within an acceptable time frame, and at an appropriate level of quality. One potential method for assisting these consumers is to employ a personalisable, explicit definition of quality to focus information search results. In this paper we discuss the feasibility of this approac...

Consumer retrieval of health information through the internet has become prevalent. In the past, physicians provided filtered health information to the consumer. However, the availability of health related information including disease specific research trends over the World Wide Web is useful for clinicians and consumers. The use of internet based health care information by clinicians and cons...

BACKGROUND The use of Internet protocol television (IPTV) as a channel for consumer health information is a relatively under-explored area of medical Internet research. IPTV may afford new opportunities for health care service providers to provide health information and for consumers, patients, and caretakers to access health information. The technologies of Web 2.0 add a new and even less expl...

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce is a growing area of e-commerce. However, according to a meta-analysis of critical themes of e-commerce , C2C e-commerce was only represented in the area of online auctions (Wareham, Zheng, & Straub, 2005). C2C e-commerce can encompass much more than just auctions. The question then becomes, " is C2C e-commerce a different research area that deserves its ow...

Common people often experience difficulties in accessing relevant, correct, accurate and understandable health information online. Developing search techniques that aid these information needs is challenging. In this paper we present the datasets created by CLEF eHealth Lab from 2013-2015 for evaluation of search solutions to support common people finding health information online. Specifically...

The purpose – The prompt and efficient changes in technology during the past few decades have affected tourism industry. With new emerging technologies (internet) the method of doing business has changed; which makes it a very important factor to understand the consumer behavior and perception in order to recognize, captivate, and retain the customers in the internet based travelling industry. ...

High throughput approaches such as whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES) create an unprecedented amount of data providing powerful resources for clinical care and research. Recently, WGS and WES services have been made available by commercial direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies. The DTC offer of genetic testing (GT) has already brought attention to potentially problemati...