Location-based expert system for diabetes diagnosis and medication recommendation

Abstract

Using expert systems in the medical field has been practiced continuously for the past decades. There are attempts of using expert systems for diabetes diagnosis. In this paper, we go further by proposing an expert system that not only diagnoses diabetes but also suggests the right medication depending on the location where the patient lives and on the symptoms of the patient and other effective factors. This system can be very helpful to many diabetic patients especially to those that are not aware of their disease type or how to control it. The system outputs a list of names of locally available brand names of the medications that suit the diabetes type of the patient and that don’t pose any danger on the health of the patient according to his/her symptoms, effective factors, and results of the patient’s medical tests. Our expert system is capable of reasoning using either forward chaining or backward chaining. The rules in the knowledge base are collected from various sources including trusted Internet websites like MAYO Clinic and FDA.org and articles published in scientific journals. In order to verify the content of the knowledge base, a medical expert and a pharmacist working in Kuwait were consulted.