{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]],"date-time":"2026-06-10T04:14:45Z","timestamp":1781064885082,"version":"3.54.1"},"reference-count":56,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,28]],"date-time":"2020-02-28T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1582848000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Algorithms"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Providing useful resources to patients is essential in achieving the vision of participatory medicine. However, the problem of identifying pertinent content for a group of patients is even more difficult than identifying information for just one. Nevertheless, studies suggest that the group dynamics-based principles of behavior change have a positive effect on the patients\u2019 welfare. Along these lines, in this paper, we present a multidimensional recommendation model in the health domain using collaborative filtering. We propose a novel semantic similarity function between users, going beyond patient medical problems, considering additional dimensions such as the education level, the health literacy, and the psycho-emotional status of the patients. Exploiting those dimensions, we are interested in providing recommendations that are both high relevant and fair to groups of patients. Consequently, we introduce the notion of fairness and we present a new aggregation method, accumulating preference scores. We experimentally show that our approach can perform better recommendations to small group of patients for useful information documents.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/a13030054","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,3,2]],"date-time":"2020-03-02T04:16:16Z","timestamp":1583122576000},"page":"54","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":12,"title":["Multidimensional Group Recommendations in the Health Domain"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"given":"Maria","family":"Stratigi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, 33100 Tampere, Finland"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Haridimos","family":"Kondylakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation of Research &amp; Technology-Hellas (FORTH), 70013 Iraklio, Greece"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Kostas","family":"Stefanidis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, 33100 Tampere, Finland"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,28]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"1547","article-title":"Evaluating the quality of online information about concussions","volume":"27","author":"Berg","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Am. Acad. PAS"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"24","DOI":"10.1016\/j.pec.2005.10.006","article-title":"Patients using the Internet to obtain health information: How this affects the patient-health professional relationship","volume":"63","author":"McMullan","year":"2006","journal-title":"Patient Educ. Couns."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wiesner, M., and Pfeifer, D. (2010, January 11\u201312). Adapting recommender systems to the requirements of personal health record systems. Proceedings of the ACM International Health Informatics Symposium, IHI 2010, Arlington, VA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1882992.1883053"},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e87","DOI":"10.2196\/jmir.5342","article-title":"Testing the Efficacy of OurSpace, a Brief, Group Dynamics-Based Physical Activity Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial","volume":"18","author":"Brandon","year":"2016","journal-title":"J. Med. Internet Res."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e238","DOI":"10.2196\/jmir.4829","article-title":"Using WhatsApp and Facebook Online Social Groups for Smoking Relapse Prevention for Recent Quitters: A Pilot Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial","volume":"17","author":"Cheung","year":"2015","journal-title":"J. Med. Internet Res."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"e256","DOI":"10.2196\/jmir.3517","article-title":"Emotional Approach Coping and the Effects of Online Peer-Led Support Group Participation Among Patients With Breast Cancer: A Longitudinal Study","volume":"16","author":"Batenburg","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. Med. Internet Res."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Serbos, D., Qi, S., Mamoulis, N., Pitoura, E., and Tsaparas, P. (2017, January 3\u20137). Fairness in Package-to-Group Recommendations. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), Perth, Australia.","DOI":"10.1145\/3038912.3052612"},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Machado, L., and Stefanidis, K. (2019, January 14\u201317). Fair Team Recommendations for Multidisciplinary Projects. Proceedings of the IEEE\/WIC\/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI), Thessaloniki, Greece.","DOI":"10.1145\/3350546.3352533"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stratigi, M., Kondylakis, H., and Stefanidis, K. (2017, January 19\u201322). Fairness in Group Recommendations in the Health Domain. Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2017, San Diego, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE.2017.217"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stratigi, M., Kondylakis, H., and Stefanidis, K. (2018, January 9). The FairGRecs Dataset: A Dataset for Producing Health-related Recommendations. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Semantic Web Technologies for Health Data Management, SWH@ISWC 2018, Monterey, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/3377391.3377401"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stratigi, M., Kondylakis, H., and Stefanidis, K. (2018, January 3\u20136). FairGRecs: Fair Group Recommendations by Exploiting Personal Health Information. Proceedings of the Database and Expert Systems Applications\u201429th International Conference, DEXA 2018, Regensburg, Germany.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-98812-2_11"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"103342","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jbi.2019.103342","article-title":"Patient empowerment for cancer patients through a novel ICT infrastructure","volume":"101","author":"Kondylakis","year":"2020","journal-title":"J. Biomed. Inform."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kondylakis, H., Koumakis, L., Katehakis, D.G., Kouroubali, A., Marias, K., Tsiknakis, M., Simos, P.G., and Karademas, E. (2019, January 5\u20137). Developing a Data Infrastructure for Enabling Breast Cancer Women to BOUNCE Back. Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, CBMS 2019, Cordoba, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/CBMS.2019.00134"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"109","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2013.03.012","article-title":"Recommender systems survey","volume":"46","author":"Bobadilla","year":"2013","journal-title":"Knowl.-Based Syst."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mooney, R.J., and Roy, L. (2000, January 2\u20137). Content-based book recommending using learning for text categorization. Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, San Antonio, TX, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/336597.336662"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"77","DOI":"10.1145\/245108.245126","article-title":"GroupLens: Applying Collaborative Filtering to Usenet News","volume":"40","author":"Konstan","year":"1997","journal-title":"Commun. ACM"},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"12","DOI":"10.1016\/j.dss.2015.03.008","article-title":"Recommender system application developments: A survey","volume":"74","author":"Lu","year":"2015","journal-title":"Decis. Support Syst."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Yin, Z., Gupta, M., Weninger, T., and Han, J. (2010, January 26\u201330). LINKREC: A unified framework for link recommendation with user attributes and graph structure. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1772690.1772879"},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1778","DOI":"10.1109\/TKDE.2013.79","article-title":"QueRIE: Collaborative Database Exploration","volume":"26","author":"Eirinaki","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Koskela, M., Simola, I., and Stefanidis, K. (2018, January 10\u201313). Open Source Software Recommendations Using Github. Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Porto, Portugal.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-00066-0_24"},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ge, X., Chrysanthis, P.K., and Pelechrinis, K. (2016, January 13\u201316). MPG: Not So Random Exploration of a City. Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), Porto, Portugal.","DOI":"10.1109\/MDM.2016.24"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stratigi, M., Nummenmaa, J., Pitoura, E., and Stefanidis, K. (April, January 30). Fair Sequential Group Recommendations. Proceedings of the 35th ACM\/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2020, Brno, Czech Republic.","DOI":"10.1145\/3341105.3375766"},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Borges, R., and Stefanidis, K. (2019, January 12\u201314). Enhancing Long Term Fairness in Recommendations with Variational Autoencoders. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems, MEDES 2019, Limassol, Cyprus.","DOI":"10.1145\/3297662.3365798"},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Stefanidis, K., Kondylakis, H., and Troullinou, G. (2017, January 19\u201322). On Recommending Evolution Measures: A Human-Aware Approach. Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2017, San Diego, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDE.2017.231"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Troullinou, G., Kondylakis, H., Stefanidis, K., and Plexousakis, D. (2018, January 8\u201312). Exploring RDFS KBs Using Summaries. Proceedings of the The Semantic Web\u2014ISWC 2018\u201417th International Semantic Web Conference, Monterey, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-00671-6_16"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gartrell, M., Xing, X., Lv, Q., Beach, A., Han, R., Mishra, S., and Seada, K. (2010, January 6\u201310). Enhancing group recommendation by incorporating social relationship interactions. Proceedings of the 2010 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP 2010, Sanibel Island, FL, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1880071.1880087"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2394","DOI":"10.1109\/TSMC.2017.2695158","article-title":"Opinion Dynamics-Based Group Recommender Systems","volume":"48","author":"Castro","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Syst."},{"key":"ref_28","first-page":"754","article-title":"Group Recommendation: Semantics and Efficiency","volume":"2","author":"Roy","year":"2009","journal-title":"PVLDB"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ntoutsi, E., Stefanidis, K., N\u00f8rv\u00e5g, K., and Kriegel, H. (2012, January 15\u201318). Fast Group Recommendations by Applying User Clustering. Proceedings of the Conceptual Modeling\u201431st International Conference ER 2012, Florence, Italy.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-34002-4_10"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Qi, S., Mamoulis, N., Pitoura, E., and Tsaparas, P. (2016, January 12\u201315). Recommending Packages to Groups. Proceedings of the IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2016, Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDM.2016.0056"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2580","DOI":"10.3390\/ijerph110302580","article-title":"Health Recommender Systems: Concepts, Requirements, Technical Basics and Challenges","volume":"11","author":"Pfeifer","year":"2014","journal-title":"Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health"},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sch\u00e4fer, H., Hors-Fraile, S., Karumur, R.P., Valdez, A.C., Said, A., Torkamaan, H., Ulmer, T., and Trattner, C. (2017, January 2\u20135). Towards Health (Aware) Recommender Systems. Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Digital Health, London, UK.","DOI":"10.1145\/3079452.3079499"},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"143","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ijmedinf.2017.12.018","article-title":"Analyzing recommender systems for health promotion using a multidisciplinary taxonomy: A scoping review","volume":"114","author":"Romero","year":"2018","journal-title":"Int. J. Med Inform."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Agapito, G., Calabrese, B., Guzzi, P.H., Cannataro, M., Simeoni, M., Care, I., Lamprinoudi, T., Fuiano, G., and Pujia, A. (2016, January 17\u201319). DIETOS: A recommender system for adaptive diet monitoring and personalized food suggestion. Proceedings of the 2th IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, WiMob 2016, New York, NY, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/WiMOB.2016.7763190"},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"201","DOI":"10.1111\/exsy.12143","article-title":"Nutrition for Elder Care: A nutritional semantic recommender system for the elderly","volume":"33","author":"Hurtado","year":"2016","journal-title":"Expert Syst."},{"key":"ref_36","unstructured":"Hors-Fraile, S., N\u00fa\u00f1ez-Benjumea, F.J., Hern\u00e1ndez, L.C., Ruiz, F.O., and Fern\u00e1ndez-Luque, L. (2016). Design of two combined health recommender systems for tailoring messages in a smoking cessation app. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"80","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-10752-9_4","article-title":"Development and Evaluation of Methodology for Personal Recommendations Applicable in Connected Health","volume":"Volume 11369","author":"Ganchev","year":"2019","journal-title":"Enhanced Living Environments\u2014Algorithms, Architectures, Platforms, and Systems"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"49201","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2019.2910641","article-title":"Integration of Recommendation Systems Into Connected Health for Effective Management of Chronic Diseases","volume":"7","author":"Afolabi","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hu, H., Elkus, A., and Kerschberg, L. (2016, January 18\u201321). A Personal Health Recommender System incorporating personal health records, modular ontologies, and crowd-sourced data. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE\/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ASONAM.2016.7752367"},{"key":"ref_40","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"387","DOI":"10.1109\/JBHI.2018.2813424","article-title":"Personalized Adaptive CBR Bolus Recommender System for Type 1 Diabetes","volume":"23","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE J. Biomed. Health Inform."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"855","DOI":"10.1007\/s11042-011-0920-0","article-title":"Item recommendation based on context-aware model for personalized u-healthcare service","volume":"71","author":"Kim","year":"2014","journal-title":"Multimed. Tools Appl."},{"key":"ref_42","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"221","DOI":"10.1016\/j.compeleceng.2015.07.017","article-title":"Design and evaluation of a cloud-based Mobile Health Information Recommendation system on wireless sensor networks","volume":"49","author":"Wang","year":"2016","journal-title":"Comput. Electr. Eng."},{"key":"ref_43","unstructured":"Kondylakis, H., Koumakis, L., Kazantzaki, E., Chatzimina, M., Psaraki, M., Marias, K., and Tsiknakis, M. (2015, January 19\u201323). Patient Empowerment through Personal Medical Recommendations. Proceedings of the MEDINFO 2015: EHealth-enabled Health\u2014Proceedings of the 15th World Congress on Health and Biomedical Informatics, S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil."},{"key":"ref_44","unstructured":"Kondylakis, H., Koumakis, L., Psaraki, M., Troullinou, G., Chatzimina, M., Kazantzaki, E., Marias, K., and Tsiknakis, M. (2015, January 11). Semantically-enabled Personal Medical Information Recommender. Proceedings of the ISWC 2015 Posters & Demonstrations Track co-located with the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2015), Bethlehem, PA, USA."},{"key":"ref_45","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"7451","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eswa.2012.01.112","article-title":"Property-based collaborative filtering for health-aware recommender systems","volume":"39","author":"Nores","year":"2012","journal-title":"Expert Syst. Appl."},{"key":"ref_46","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Qin, L., Xu, X., and Li, J. (2018, January 25\u201330). A Real-Time Professional Content Recommendation System for Healthcare Providers\u2019 Knowledge Acquisition. Proceedings of the Big Data\u2014BigData 2018\u20147th International Congress, Held as Part of the Services Conference Federation, SCF 2018, Seattle, WA, USA.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-94301-5_31"},{"key":"ref_47","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bermingham, A., Caprani, N., Collins, R., Gurrin, C., Irving, K., O\u2019Rourke, J., Smeaton, A.F., and Yang, Y. (2015). Recommending Video Content for Use in Group-Based Reminiscence Therapy. Health Monitoring and Personalized Feedback Using Multimedia Data, Springer.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-17963-6_12"},{"key":"ref_48","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"400","DOI":"10.3332\/ecancer.2014.400","article-title":"et al. Development of interactive empowerment services in support of personalised medicine","volume":"8","author":"Kondylakis","year":"2014","journal-title":"eCancer"},{"key":"ref_49","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"9","DOI":"10.1080\/10810730.2010.499985","article-title":"Health Literacy: What Is It?","volume":"15","author":"Berkman","year":"2010","journal-title":"J. Health Commun."},{"key":"ref_50","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1228","DOI":"10.1111\/j.1525-1497.2004.40153.x","article-title":"Literacy and health outcomes","volume":"19","author":"Berkman","year":"2004","journal-title":"J. Gen. Intern. Med."},{"key":"ref_51","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Lillie, S.E., Fu, S.S., Fabbrini, A.E., Rice, K.L., Clothier, B.A., Doro, E., Melzer, A.C., and Partin, M.R. (2018). Does need for cognitive closure explain individual differences in lung cancer screening? A brief report. J. Health Psychol., 1359105317750253.","DOI":"10.1177\/1359105317750253"},{"key":"ref_52","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"877","DOI":"10.1007\/s00778-010-0209-3","article-title":"Space efficiency in group recommendation","volume":"19","author":"Roy","year":"2010","journal-title":"VLDB J."},{"key":"ref_53","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"353","DOI":"10.1007\/s00355-011-0603-9","article-title":"The original Borda count and partial voting","volume":"40","author":"Emerson","year":"2013","journal-title":"Soc. Choice Welf."},{"key":"ref_54","unstructured":"Kartoun, U. (2016). A Methodology to Generate Virtual Patient Repositories. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_55","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"243","DOI":"10.1145\/3130348.3130374","article-title":"IR Evaluation Methods for Retrieving Highly Relevant Documents","volume":"51","year":"2017","journal-title":"SIGIR Forum"},{"key":"ref_56","unstructured":"Kendall, M. (1948). Rank Correlation Methods, Griffin."}],"container-title":["Algorithms"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-4893\/13\/3\/54\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T09:02:39Z","timestamp":1760173359000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-4893\/13\/3\/54"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,28]]},"references-count":56,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,3]]}},"alternative-id":["a13030054"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/a13030054","relation":{},"ISSN":["1999-4893"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1999-4893","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,2,28]]}}}