Design of an Internet-Based Advisory System: A Multi-agent Approach

Abstract

With the emerging proliferation of information and communications technology in the home and work environments, the provision of computer-based medical advisory systems in healthcare could lead to huge savings to the cost of caring for patients with chronic conditions, such as, diabetes, asthma and hypertension. This paper proposes that an internet-based medical expert system could facilitate a far more efficient system in eliminating the number of unnecessary visits to General Practitioner (GP) for routine consultations. An internet-based intelligent system implementing a variety of functions carried in GP consultations is, thus proposed. The system design is based on multi-agent architecture, which attempts to replicate the roles of each person in a typical GP consultation environment. The role of clinical decision-making is carried out by a fuzzy inference engine linked to a knowledge-base of patient records. The management of diabetes is presented as a case study in the paper.