Challenges and Opportunities of Using Recommender Systems for Personalized Health Education Luis FERNANDEZ-LUQUE a, 1 , Randi KARLSEN a,b , Lars K. VOGNILD a a Northern Research Institute (Norut), Tromso, Norway b Computer Science Department, University of Tromso, Norway Abstract. The use of computers in health education started more than a decade ago, mainly for tailoring health educational resources. Nowadays, many of the computer-tailoring health education systems are using the Internet for delivering different types of health education. Traditionally, these systems are designed for a specific health problem, with a predefined library of educational resources. These systems do not take advantage of the increasing amount of educational resources available on the Internet. One of the reasons is that the high availability of content is making it more difficult to find the relevant one. The problem of information overload has been addressed for many years in the field of recommender systems. This paper is focused on the challenges and opportunities of merging recommender systems with personalized health education. It also discusses the usage of social networks and semantic technologies within this approach. Keywords. recommender systems, health education, personalization, tailored health education 1. Introduction Health Education aims to promote, maintain or restore the health of individuals by informing and persuading. Internet is becoming one of the main sources of Health Education and Information, and there are a wide range of resources from different providers. In fact, recent studies show that most Europeans search in the Internet for health information [1]. Despite the availability of many good educational resources, the task of identifying the relevant ones can be very difficult for the user. Additionally, the users have to deal with the appearance of many health resources of a very low quality, or even with misleading information, such as content promoting anorexia (aka proana). One of the main reasons for the difficulty of finding relevant educational resources is that the health information space on the Internet is huge and it is leading to an information overload problem. The use of computers in Health Education started in the mid 90s as a tool to assist the health educators for tailoring resources [2–4]. Computer-Tailoring Health Education Systems (CTHES) could be seen as Expert Systems for automating many of the tasks performed by the health educators. CTHES are used to create educational 1 Corresponding Author: Northern Research Institute, Postboks 6434 Forskningsparken, 9294 Tromsø, Norway; E-mail: luis.luque@norut.no. Medical Informatics in a United and Healthy Europe K.-P. Adlassnig et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2009 © 2009 European Federation for Medical Informatics. All rights reserved. doi:10.3233/978-1-60750-044-5-903 903