International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems

Health is at the center of our everyday lives. During the 1st Health Recommender Systems workshop we elaborated a great variety of fields in which recommender systems can improve our awareness, understanding and behavior regarding our own health. At the same time these application areas bring new challenges into the recommender community. Recommendations that influence the health status of a patient, need to be either liable or accompanied by domain experts. To make the recommender liable, complex domain specific user models need to be created, which on the other hand creates privacy issues. While trust into a recommendation needs to be explicitly earned by transparency, explanations and empowerment, other systems might want to persuade users into beneficial actions that would not be willingly chosen otherwise. The variety of those challenges also results from the number and diversity of stakeholders involved in health systems. Taking the patient perspective, simple interaction and safety against harmful recommendations might be the prior concern. For clinicians and experts, on the other hand, what matters is precise and accurate content. Finally, health care providers, insurance companies, and clinics are interested in success rates, study results, and financial benefits of the new systems. In this workshop, we want to go deeper into the discussions started last year and establish a roadmap of possible research topics in Health Recommender Systems.