Ontological modelling and rule‐based reasoning for the provision of personalized patient education

Current approaches to patient education provide generic standardized materials to all patients regardless of their demographics such as age and cognitive abilities. Thus, the effectiveness of this approach may suffer from a patient's motivation to fully engage with the material. To alleviate these concerns, this study proposes a personalized approach to patient education that is tailored to the individual characteristics and health objectives of the patient. Personalized features will enhance the comprehensibility and usability of the process of medical education. Taking this into consideration, this paper introduces a conceptual architecture to create a web-based personalized patient education experience. A key component of this architecture comprises ontological models of the patient themselves, their medical conditions, physical activities and their educational attainments. Furthermore, rule-based reasoning is also proposed to achieve this personalization. A use case scenario is provided to highlight the effectiveness of personalized education provision.