A Whole-Person Function Dictionary for the Mobility, Self-Care and Domestic Life Domains: a Seedset Expansion Approach.

Whole-person functional limitations in the areas of mobility, self-care and domestic life affect a majority of individuals with disabilities. Detecting, recording and monitoring such limitations would benefit those individuals, as well as research on whole-person function and general public health. Dictionaries of linguistic expressions related to whole-person function would enable automated identification and extraction of relevant information. However, no such resources currently exist, due in part to a lack of standardized coding and their availability mainly in free text clinical notes. In this paper, we introduce dictionaries of whole-person function in the domains of mobility, self-care and domestic life, built and evaluated using a small set of manually annotated clinical notes, which provided a seedset that was expanded using a mix of lexical and deep learning approaches.