The Evaluation of a Personalised Health Information System for Patients with Cancer

In this paper we describe the evaluation of a personalised information system for patients with cancer. Our system dynamically generates hypertext pages that explain treatments, diseases, measurements etc related to the patient's condition, using information in the patient's medical record as the basis for the tailoring. We describe results of a controlled trial comparing this system with a nonpersonalised one. The results of the trial slow significant results concerning the patients' preferences for personalised information. We discuss the implications of our evaluation and results for the development and evaluation of future personalised systems, and adaptive hypertext systems in particular.