title: Towards collaborative filtering recommender systems for tailored health communications.
abstract: The goal of computer tailored health communications (CTHC) is to promote healthy behaviors by sending messages tailored to individual patients. Current CTHC systems collect baseline patient "profiles" and then use expert-written, rule-based systems to target messages to subsets of patients. Our main interest in this work is the study of collaborative filtering-based CTHC systems that can learn to tailor future message selections to individual patients based explicit feedback about past message selections. This paper reports the results of a study designed to collect explicit feedback (ratings) regarding four aspects of messages from 100 subjects in the smoking cessation support domain. Our results show that most users have positive opinions of most messages and that the ratings for all four aspects of the messages are highly correlated with each other. Finally, we conduct a range of rating prediction experiments comparing several different model variations. Our results show that predicting future ratings based on each user's past ratings contributes the most to predictive accuracy.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
authors.forename: Benjamin M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Marlin
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
authors.forename: Roy J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Adams
authors.affiliation: Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Medical School.
authors.forename: Rajani
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sadasivam
authors.affiliation: Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Medical School.
authors.forename: Thomas K
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Houston
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D058015:Health Communication / Q000379:methods*; D006266:Health Education / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D016540:Smoking Cessation