A Multi-Agent Medical System for Indian Rural Infant and Child Care

Abstract

In this paper, a Multi-agent System (MAS) is presented for providing clinical decision support to healthcare practitioners in rural or remote areas of India for young infants or children up to the age of 5 years. The government is unable to appoint child specialists in rural areas because of inadequate number of available pediatricians. It leads to a high Infant Mortality rate (IMR). In such a scenario, software agents provide a realistic solution. The agent-based prototype has been developed that involves a knowledge component called an Intelligent Pediatric Assistant (IPA); and User Agents (UA)along with their Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The GUI of UA provides the interface to the healthcare practitioner for submitting sign-symptoms and displaying the expert opinion as suggested by IPA. Depending upon the observations, the IPA decides the diagnosis and the treatment plan. The UA and IPA form client-server architecture for knowledge sharing.