Saluteca, a Spanish Health Video Portal

Abstract

Videos are the most common, direct and easy way to transmit an idea or a message and they are one of the more popular ways people use to create and upload contents on the Internet. Youtube is a resource that makes this possible, but one of its weak points is that it hosts many mixed videos which are of low interest and can be considered as “spam”. On the other hand, the use of Social Media is increasing in the health sector, as patients and health professionals need to answer questions and express their experiences and feelings. The lack of health information encouraged these actors to turn to social media for support and advocacy, and videos have the advantages of being engaging and easy to understand. Saluteca is a web platform that collects trustworthy Spanish health videos from Youtube and offers them in a meaningful way. This paper describes Saluteca and explains the crawling method used to retrieve these videos from trusted Spanish channels.