Welcome to web4health.info mental health and psychology information

Web4health : Mental health and psychology information online

Web4health Mental health and psychology adviceis a multilingual web-site developed by medical practitioners, psychiatrists and psychotherapists from different European countries (Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden) that enables site visitors to ask questions about issues relating to mental health and well-being, psychiatry and related topics.

Operational since 1st July 2003, Web4Health developed to be a popular webpage in the mental health domain with well over 80.000 unique visitors per month and a loyal user community - due to the quality and reliability of the multilingual content provided.

As one of 32 finalists of the eEurope Awards for eHealth – 2004, Web4Health was presented at the High-Level European eHealth Conference and Exhibition in Cork, Ireland organised by the Irish Presidency from 5-6 May 2004 (Theme 1: eHealth Information tools and services for citizens).
Web4Health - The future
From a technical point of view, Web4Health developed a highly innovative approach for multilingual content dissemination with a natural language template based expert system tool for answering questions of Internet users in very different areas of interest. The system implies a lot of opportunities to be transferred to entirely different areas.
This innovation aspect is also true for the multilingual coverage of the site content. In the course of the present project the team developed among others a new machine translation engine for the Swedish-English translation and a new Finnish language webpage. This is an example how the project also addressed "smaller" language regions. For a follow-up project the team considers to include 12 European countries and cover also Eastern European languages. It is intended to optimize the system adapting it to the use of even more languages in the future. This implies great opportunities as regards adaptation of user needs in an enlarged European union with 20 languages.
Especially this aspect is of major interest to experts worldwide being active in the eHealth domain. The project team received a lot of positive feedback at the MEDNET 2003 and the 12th AEP (Association of European Psychiatrists) Congress 2004 in Geneva. Especially experts from Eastern Europe, Asia and African countries showed strong interest in this tool to disseminate public health information.
The Web4Health team believes that is one of the major tasks for the future will be to develop appropriate public health information tools in a multilingual environment. Based on present experiences the team developed new ideas how to proceed in the future and made a lot of valuable contacts world-wide.

We will try to collect valuable mental health information in this blogger and newsfeed and discuss related topics with our readers.