Sentic PROMs: Application of sentic computing to the development of a novel unified framework for measuring health-care quality

Barriers to use health related quality of life measuring systems include the time needed to complete the forms and the need for staff to be trained to understand the results. An ideal system of health assessment needs to be clinically useful, timely, sensitive to change, culturally sensitive, low burden, low cost, involving for the patient and built into standard procedures. A new generation of short and easy-to-use tools to monitor patient outcomes on a regular basis has been recently proposed. These tools are quick, effective and easy to understand, as they are very structured and rigid. Such structuredness, however, leaves no space to those patients who would like to say something more. Patients, in fact, are usually willing to express their opinions and feelings in free text, rather than simply filling in a questionnaire, for either speaking out their satisfaction or for cathartic complaining. Sentic PROMs allow patients to evaluate their health status and experience in a semi-structured way and accordingly aggregate input data by means of sentic computing, while tracking patients' physio-emotional sensitivity. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.