The evaluation of a personalised health information system for patients with cancer

In this paper we describe the evaluation of a personalised information syst em for patients with cancer. Our system dynamically generates hypertext pag es that explain treatments, diseases, measurements etc related to the patie nt's condition, using information in the patient's medical record as the ba sis for the tailoring. We describe results of a controlled trial comparing this system with a nonpersonalised one. The results of the trial slow signi ficant results concerning the patients' preferences for personalised inform ation. We discuss the implications of our evaluation and results for the de velopment and evaluation of future personalised systems, and adaptive hyper text systems in particular.