A Mobile Phone-Based Expert System for Disease Diagnosis - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 222

Chapter 11

A Mobile Phone-Based Expert
System for Disease Diagnosis

Olufemi Moses Oyelami
Covenant University, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Medicine is one of the areas that has benefited from the use of artificial intelligence since the advent of
machine intelligence. Different expert systems for diagnosing diseases have been developed; however,
they are either standalone or Web-based systems. This puts a vast majority of Africans in general and
Nigerians in particular at a disadvantage, because of computer literacy, accessibility, and usage are
very low in this region of the world. Recent advances in the capabilities of mobile phones and increased
usage, however, have opened up new opportunities for innovative and complex applications that can be
accessed via mobile phones. This chapter presents a disease diagnosis system that can be accessed via
mobile phones to cater to the needs of the vast majority of users in places where healthcare is inadequate.

INTRODUCTION

to aid in the process of diagnosis. They have also
been used as decision support systems for physi-
cians. These existing automated disease diagnosis
systems are, however, either standalone or web-
based systems. Considering the fact that computer
literacy and the ratio of computers to humans
in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular is
very low (Jegede & Owolabi, 2003; Esharenana
& Emperor, 2010), there is therefore, a need to
find an alternative and a more readily available
means to fill these gaps identified, and cater for
the needs of the people in this part of the world.

Physicians often diagnose diseases in order to
determine the nature of treatment that will be
prescribed. According to Oxford Concise Medical
Dictionary (2002), diagnosis involves determining
the nature of a disorder by considering patient's
signs and symptoms. It also involves reasoning
based on expert knowledge to determine the nature
of illness. With the advent of artificial intelligence,
however, software systems have been developed