Improving dental care recommendation systems using trust and social networks

The growing popularity of Health Social Networking sites has a tremendous impact on people´s health related experiences. However, without any quality filtering, there could be a detrimental effect on the users´ health. Trust-based techniques have been identified as effective methods to filter the information for recommendation systems. This research focuses on dental care related social networks and recommendation systems. Trust is critical when choosing a dental care provider due to the invasive nature of the treatment. Surprisingly, current dental care recommendation systems do not use trust-based techniques, and most of them are simple reviews and ratings sites. This research aims at improving dental care recommendation systems by proposing a new framework, taking trust into account. It derives trust from both users´ social networks and from existing crowdsourced information on dental care. Such a framework could be used for other healthcare recommendation systems where trust is of major importance.