Adaptive medical information delivery: combining user, situation, and task models

Medical information delivery for users with different levels of expertise will be required for the manned mission to Mars due to limited potential for communication with Earth. The Mars Medical Assistant uses a combination of user, situation, and task models to create virtual hypertext structures by piecing together medical "information components." Determination of which information components will be shown to the user and in what order is based on both the semantic content of the component and the cognitive characteristics of the component's media type. The medical assistant currently supports three tasks: 1) describing medical procedures, 2) aiding diagnosis, and 3) providing information on health concerns.