The effective and targeted provision of health information to consumers, specifically tailored to their needs and preferences, is indispensable in healthcare. With access to appropriate health information and adequate understanding, consumers are more likely to make informed and healthy decisions, become more proficient in recognizing symptoms, and potentially experience improvements in the prevention or treatment of their medical conditions. Most of today's health information, however, is provided in the form of static documents. In this paper, we present a novel and innovative visual health information system based on adaptive document visualizations. Depending on the user's information needs and preferences, the system can display its content with document visualization techniques at different levels of detail, aggregation, and visual granularity. Users can navigate using content organization along sections or automatically computed topics, and choose abstractions from full texts to word clouds. Our first contribution is a formative user study which demonstrated that the implemented document visualizations offer several advantages over traditional forms of document exploration. Informed from that, we identified a number of crucial aspects for further system development. Our second contribution is the introduction of an interaction provenance visualization which allows users to inspect which content, in which representation, and in which order has been received. We show how this allows to analyze different document exploration and navigation patterns, useful for automatic adaptation and recommendation functions. We also define a baseline taxonomy for adapting the document presentations which can, in principle, be leveraged by the observed user patterns. The interaction provenance view, furthermore, allows users to reflect on their exploration and inform future usage of the system.

翻译：向消费者有效且有针对性地提供健康信息，特别是根据其需求和偏好进行定制，在医疗保健领域不可或缺。通过获取适当的健康信息并充分理解，消费者更有可能做出明智的健康决策，更熟练地识别症状，并可能在疾病预防或治疗方面获得改善。然而，目前大多数健康信息以静态文档形式提供。本文提出了一种基于自适应文档可视化的创新视觉健康信息系统。根据用户的信息需求和偏好，该系统能够以不同细节层次、聚合程度和视觉粒度的文档可视化技术展示内容。用户可通过按章节或自动计算主题的内容组织进行导航，并选择从全文到词云等多种抽象表现形式。我们的第一项贡献是一项形成性用户研究，证明所实现的文档可视化相比传统文档探索形式具有多项优势。基于此，我们确定了系统进一步开发的若干关键方向。第二项贡献是引入了交互溯源可视化功能，使用户能够检查接收了哪些内容、以何种形式呈现以及按何种顺序接收。我们展示了如何利用该功能分析不同的文档探索与导航模式，这对自动适应和推荐功能具有重要意义。同时，我们定义了文档呈现自适应调整的基准分类体系，该体系原则上可通过观察到的用户模式进行优化。此外，交互溯源视图使用户能够反思其探索过程，并为未来系统使用提供参考。