Health Literacy Drift in Online Health Communities

Online Health Communities (OHCs) have been used to improve personal health literacy. Based on data from a breast cancer OHC, we applied LIWC to quantify different dimensions of health literacy and applied the unsupervised learning algorithm to aggregate users’ health literacy and depicted individual health literacy trajectories in two years. The preliminary results indicate that the related ability of 71.1% of users flows among different health literacy dimensions. The findings of this study would be beneficial for the operation and management of OHCs.