A Mobile Based Expert System for Disease Diagnosis and Medical Advice Provisioning

Abstract

Most developing countries like Nigeria are facing health care challenges caused by inadequate medical personnel, shortage of modern medical equipment and the dearth of modern hospitals in the rural, leading to high mortality rate especially in these rural areas. Statistics have revealed the high number of smartphones in different parts of Nigeria. Hence, a mobile based system could serve as a solution to these problems. Some researchers in this area of study tried to develop different stand-alone and web-based medical diagnostics systems using different approaches, in order to provide easy and fast access to diagnose and provide medical advices. In this paper, a rule based mobile expert system was designed and implemented to proffer diagnosis and medical advices to ten (10) common diseases that are prevalent in Nigeria. The mobile system was implemented on Android operating system technology which is the one the most common mobile operating system in Nigeria presently. The system was evaluated with some users and the results of the evaluation carried out on the system emphasizes its usefulness as an efficient decision support tool in the diagnosis and medical provisioning of the common health problems in Nigeria with a very high success rate from prospective users.