Design and implementation of an expert system for the diagnosis and treatment of water related diseases

A nation has a moral obligation to ensure its citizens receive quality medical services as healthy citizens contribute to a thriving nation. The realm of medical science is vast and intricate, demanding a multitude of skills. Therefore, it seems that the progress of nations is linked to the management of the scarcity of medical science skills, a deficit that impacts the accuracy and effectiveness of disease diagnosis and treatment. This need is particularly significant in Cameroon, as indicated in the March-April 2019 issue of the GEOMATIC STRATEGY report. In the provided text, it is stated that there is a ratio of 1 doctor for every 10,000 people, whereas in certain health districts, the ratio is 1 doctor for every 500,000 people. That's why our focus at the GIA laboratory at ENSET of Douala, affiliated with the University of Douala, is to shorten waiting times in waiting areas or rooms, enhance the quality and precision of diagnoses, and ultimately improve the level of service offered to patients. To achieve this, we utilize an expert system, a software that relies on extensive databases of expert knowledge to offer guidance or make decisions in areas such as medical diagnosis, where it aids in identifying the underlying cause of illnesses or other health issues based on symptoms. This accurate rule-based expert system intends to identify water-related diseases, which are illnesses caused by water-transmitted pathogenic microorganisms, through diagnosis. Bathing, washing, consuming water, or eating food that has come into contact with polluted water can lead to the transmission of these illnesses. It has the capability to assist caregivers to improve the diagnosis of illnesses and deliver quality healthcare services to their patients. It can be achieved by utilizing a prolog, an expert system programming language connected with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The language employs predicates as a knowledge base to store intricate structured and unstructured data for the computer system. All of this information is presented to the user through a JAVA interface. In accordance with our nation's healthcare policy, this system is causing a genuine transformation in hospital and medical facilities, including the decrease in congestion in intake areas. The utilization of information technology in the medical field is experiencing a substantial surge, leading to numerous benefits in terms of effectiveness. The structure of our work is divided into three main sections: the method, which primarily addresses the technical and scientific approach; the results and discussion, which provide an overview of the implemented elements and the observations made; and lastly, a conclusion to summarize the completion of the work.   Keywords: Expert system diagnosis prolog water diseases knowledge base