Recommender systems in a patient centric social network — A survey

In a traditional social network, users are concerned with finding people who share similar interests. In a patient centric social network, the user is a patient who is concerned about finding other patients who are having similar conditions or symptoms. A patient centric social network serves the purpose of a Health Recommender System wherein the system recommends similar patients, caregivers to its users. In this paper we survey the existing patient centric social networks, its functions, recommendation techniques used and the evaluation methods employed. Our focus is only on those recommender algorithms and strategies employed in traditional social network recommender systems, which works towards recommending similar patients in a patient centric social network.