Herbalist Diagnostic Support System: A Prototype

Abstract

The Herbalist Diagnostic Support System has been built using expert system techniques. Expert Systems are useful in capturing rare knowledge from a human expert into a computer system, thereby allowing a non-expert to be able to use the knowledge captured intothe computer to solve problems from the associated problem domain. The knowledge acquisition bottleneck is a fundamental problem in building expert systems. This work gives a report on how a Herbalist Diagnostic Support System has been built in spite of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In this report a framework where the knowledge based system approach is applied to assist attend to patients in a herbalists setting has also been formulated. The resulting prototype that was designed was evaluated by doctors, herbalists and system analysts, and found to be acceptable. They also found the system interface acceptable.