Health Literacy and the Tailoring of Health Information. A Dialogue between Communication and (AI)Technology

By moving from a health communication perspective, this paper addresses the issue of how to enhance consumers’ health literacy through virtual health environments. More specifically, the paper is structured in two parts. Firstly, we present a conceptualization of health literacy which takes into consideration the complexity of its components. Secondly, we show how this concept was used to design the website ONESELF targeted to consumers affected by chronic low back pain. Findings from our paper are expected to highlight important dimensions of health literacy that virtual healthcare systems – designed to enhance health literacy – will have to operationalise. ONESELF works through a bottom-up approach where users can ask for all information to build or reinforce their level of health literacy. This approach presupposes the physical presence of the content manager who assures the delivery of the information requested through the website. Here the main question arises of how AI systems can assure the same level of tailored information by standing, however, from a genuinely human-computer perspective