Disease Detection and Symptom Tracking by Retrieving Information from the Web

This paper proposes techniques for preliminary disease detection and personal symptom tracking adopting concepts and methods of web information retrieval. The proposed approaches are inspired by web users’ behavior. People look for information of symptoms from Internet. Therefore, considering information in Web pages, the developed system proposes possible diseases related to one or more queried symptoms. Moreover, these queried symptoms would be recorded in the query log so that the user could utilize these records to trace the history of symptoms, further to manage their own health or provide them to doctors as reference. As ranking detected diseases needs professional knowledge, we instead evaluate relevancy of retrieved sentences containing detected diseases in both strict and lenient metrics. Experimental results support the proposed ranking approach. The techniques described in this paper are also implemented to develop an Android application called “Health Generation”. In this application, the detected disease is further linked to its Wikipedia introduction and the nearby clinics are listed. Users can utilize the GPS function provided by cell phones to plan the route for them. Through the proposed approaches and the application to provide medical information and solutions according to users’ need and further to help users manage their health is the aim of this research.