A Smart Mobile App to Simplify Medical Documents and Improve Health Literacy: System Design and Feasibility Validation

Abstract

Background People with low health literacy experience more challenges in understanding instructions given by their health providers, following prescriptions, and understanding their health care system sufficiently to obtain the maximum benefits. People with insufficient health literacy have high risk of making medical mistakes, more chances of experiencing adverse drug effects, and inferior control of chronic diseases. Objective This study aims to design, develop, and evaluate a mobile health app, MediReader, to help individuals better understand complex medical materials and improve their health literacy. Methods MediReader is designed and implemented through several steps, which are as follows: measure and understand an individual’s health literacy level; identify medical terminologies that the individual may not understand based on their health literacy; annotate and interpret the identified medical terminologies tailored to the individual’s reading skill levels, with meanings defined in the appropriate external knowledge sources; evaluate MediReader using task-based user study and satisfaction surveys. Results On the basis of the comparison with a control group, user study results demonstrate that MediReader can improve users’ understanding of medical documents. This improvement is particularly significant for users with low health literacy levels. The satisfaction survey showed that users are satisfied with the tool in general. Conclusions MediReader provides an easy-to-use interface for users to read and understand medical documents. It can effectively identify medical terms that a user may not understand, and then, annotate and interpret them with appropriate meanings using languages that the user can understand. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using this tool to improve an individual’s understanding of medical materials.