Health Recommender System in Social Networks: A Case of Facebook

The proliferation of social networks provides opportunities for people to enhance their health knowledge and share their health-related information with others. This study suggests the Health Recommender System (HRS) to users of a Facebook social network site to evaluate their health status. The methodology of this paper includes two phases, in the first phase, we collected 1428 patients’ data from 4 hospitals in Tehran and, in the second phase, recommendation system provides some suggestions for users based on their current health status. The results show the effectiveness of suggested HRS in predicting the health status of Facebook users. In addition, customizing healthy status and lifestyle for users using HRS can help them to stay in a healthy condition, reducing the costs of medicine. The outcome of this research can be beneficial for health organizations to enhance individuals’ health knowledge in order to preventions diseases.