Examining the Effect of Automated Health Explanations on Older Adults’ Attitudes Toward Medication Information

In a non-clinical setting, understanding health information can be a challenge for consumers, but for some, such as older adults, a more complex health history can make this task more difficult. For some tasks such as deciding on appropriate medications, misjudgments about information can place consumers at risk. Research suggests that using technology to communicate and disseminate health information can improve understanding and lead to improved health outcomes. In this paper, we examine the impact of automatically generated explanations of medical terms on older adults’ attitudes toward medication information.

We conducted an experiment with 21 older adults where we asked them to complete tasks using medication texts that included and did not include medical terms augmented with consumer-based explanations. We collected data about their attitudes, understanding, and satisfaction with the use of both types of medication texts. We found that the inclusion of the explanations improved participants’ attitudes about the difficulty of using the text to complete medication information seeking tasks. Participants also preferred and found more helpful the medication information that included the explanations. Results suggest that automatically generated explanations of medical terms may be useful for encouraging positive attitudes about the difficulty, helpfulness, and satisfaction with the use of medication information among older adults.