Study of readability of health documents with eye-tracking approaches

International audienceMedical area is an integral part of our lives due to health concerns, but the availability of medical information does not guarantee its correct understanding by patients. Several studies addressed this issue and pointed out real difficulties in the understanding of health contents by patients. We propose to use eye-tracking methods for studying this issue. For this, original technical and simplified versions of a deidentified clinical document are exploited. Eye-tracking methods permit to follow and to record the gaze of participants and to detect reading indicators such as duration of fixations, regressions and saccades. These indicators are correlated with answers to questionnaires submitted to participants after the reading. Our results indicate that there is statistically significant difference in reading and understanding of original and simplified versions of health documents. These results, in combination with another experiment, permit to propose a typology of medical words which need to be explained or simplified to non-expert readers