Abstract

Benefits of patient education in improving patient's compliance to treatment and self management are well recognized by the health care community. Such benefits contribute to the growing interest in the use of computers to complement traditional means such as providing leaflets, instruction by the nurse and patient-doctor dialogue. Over the years a number of systems have been developed for patient education addressing the personalization and information needs of patients. Most of those systems focus mainly on personalizing the contents to be presented and give lesser importance to usability or user interface design of the software. As a result, many such systems are not deployed in hospitals. The primary focus of this thesis is to propose a patient education framework that can be successfully deployed and used in a typical hospital setting. We have explored the avenues that are identified important to have personalization in a patient education system. Model Driven Educational Assistance (MDEA) framework uses a combination of XML Topic Maps and the Learning Unit Classes (LUC) model for flexible knowledge organization. A simple and intuitive user interface was designed to help patients learn easily from the system. A functional prototype has been developed to assist transplant patients as they learn about their post transplant care. The pilot test was conducted over a period of six months at the transplant center of a Montreal hospital. The results of the evaluation were promising indicating that the software was easy to learn and to use.