HELPeR - Health e-Librarian with Personalized Recommender

As the Internet has become a prominent source of health information to guide patients’ decision-making and self-management activities, patients strongly indicate they need navigational support to locate appropriate information on the Internet. The overall goal of this project is to build and implement a “Health E-Librarian with Personalized Recommendations (HELPeR)” - a personalized information access system with a hybrid recommender engine that adapts to different aspects of the patient: information needs based on the user’s profile, the user’s uniquely expressed information interests, and the level of user’s disease-related knowledge.

This project is funded by NIH through the National Library of Medicine by grant R01-LM013038-02 (2019 - 2023).

Research Team

This project is a collaboration between the School of Nursing and the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh.

School of Computing and Information

• PI: Daqing He, Peter Brusilovsky

• Graduate researchers: Khushboo Thaker, Zhenmin Hong, Zhendong Wang, Behnam Rahdari, Mohammad Hassany

School of Nursing

• PI: Young Ji Lee, Heidi Donovan
• Postdoctoral researchers: Susan Birkhoff, Leah Rosenblum
• Graduate researchers: Yu Chi, Vivian Hui, Youjia Wang,

University Library System

SP: Mary Lou Klem

Systems

• HELPeR

Project Home Page

For a detailed description of our vision and goals, see the home page of the project

Publications

• Chi, Y., Thaker, K., He, D., Hui, V., Donovan, H., Brusilovsky, P., and Lee, Y. J. (2022) Knowledge Acquisition and Social Support in Online Health Communities: Analysis of an Online Ovarian Cancer Community. JMIR Cancer 8 (3), e39643.
• Rahdari, B., Brusilovsky, P., He, D., Thaker, K., Luo, Z., and Lee, Y. J. (2022) Helper: an interactive recommender system for ovarian cancer patients and caregivers. In: Proceedings of 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Seattle, WA, ACM, pp. 644-647.
• Thaker, K., Chi, Y., Birkhoff, S., He, D., Donovan, H., Rosenblum, L., Brusilovsky, P., Hui, V., and Lee, Y. J. (2022) Exploring Resource-Sharing Behaviors for Finding Relevant Health Resources: Analysis of an Online Ovarian Cancer Community. JMIR Cancer 8 (2), e33110.
• Chi, Y., Hui, V., Kunsak, H., Brusilovsky, P., Donovan, H., He, D., and Lee, Y. J. (2024) Women with ovarian cancer’s information seeking and avoidance behaviors: an interview study. JAMIA open 7 (1), ooae011.