Patient Empowerment Through Summarization of Discussion Threads on Treatments in a Patient Self-help Forum

Self-help patient fora are widely used for information acquisition and exchange of experiences, e.g., on the effects of medical treatments for a disease. However, a new patient may have difficulties in getting a fast overview of the information inside a large forum. We propose TinnitusTreatmentMonitor, a prototype tool for the summarization and sentiment characterization of postings on medical treatments. We report on applying TinnitusTreatmentMonitor on the platform TinnitusTalk, a self-help platform for tinnitus patients.