Resumen
Personalized and adaptive material have great potential for providing health-related information to medical consumers, to patients and to the general public. Health professionals have taken advantage of techniques such as mail merge to produce printed letters and leaflets that incorporate information for specific individuals. Adaptive and tailored messages have contributed to smoking cessation, increasing physical exercise and improving diets, as well as helping patients to manage illness such as asthma and diabetes for themselves. A range of systems have been developed that synthesize text at a fine grain down to phrases within individual sentences in real time using natural language generation techniques from artificial intelligence and provide information that is most personally relevant to the patients. They use the patient's own medical record as a basis for selecting, linking and filtering information. In the system for cancer and diabetes, they provide a summary of the patients' medical record plus hypertext pages of more general information.