JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The language gap between health consumers and health professionals has been long recognized as the hindrance for effective health information comprehension. Although providing health information access in consumer health language is widely accepted as the solution to the problem, health consumers were found to have various health language preferences and proficiencies. To adaptively simplify health documents for heterogeneous consumer groups, it is important to quantify how consumer health languages are different in terms of complexity among various consumer groups.

Objective:

This study proposes a measurement tool (CHELCS, Consumer Health Language Complexity Score) to quantify the complexity of consumer health language (CHL) using syntax-level, text-level, term-level, and semantic-level complexity measurements. Specifically, we used CHELCS to compare posts of each individual in online health forums designed for: (a) the general public, (b) D/deaf and hard of hearing (D/hh) people, and for (3) people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Methods:

Objective:

This study proposes an informatics framework (Consumer Health Language Complexity, CHELC) to assess the complexity differences of consumer health language (CHL) using syntax-level, text-level, term-level, and semantic-level complexity metrics. Specifically, we identified eight language complexity metrics validated in previous literature and combined them into a four-faceted framework. Through rank-based algorithm, we developed unifying scores (Consumer Health Language Complexity Scores, CHELCS) to quantify syntax-level (CHELCSsyntax), text-level (CHELCStext), term-level (CHELCSterm), semantic-level (CHELCSsemantic), and overall CHL complexity (CHELCSoverall). We applied CHELCS to compare posts of each individual in online health forums designed for: (a) the general public, (b) D/deaf and hard of hearing (D/hh) people, and for (3) people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Results:

The results suggest that participants in the public forum used more complex CHL, particularly more diverse semantics and more complex health terms compared to those participating in the ASD and D/hh forums. However, between the latter two, ASD users used more complex words, and D/hh users used more complex syntax.

Conclusions:

Our results showed that the users in the three online forums had significantly different CHL complexities in different facets. The proposed framework and detailed measurements helped to comprehensively quantify these CHL complexity differences. The results emphasize the importance of tailoring health content for different consumer groups with varying CHL complexities.