Development of a data-based interactive medical expert system for supporting pregnancy consultations: general architecture and methodology

Abstract

Innovations in telecommunication and online service solutions facilitate the emergence of remote medical diagnosis and treatment consultations. Using information and communication technologies (ICT’s), timely e-health services to individuals are becoming a viable alternative to traditional healthcare solutions, which reduces pressure on the health system. In our scenario for pregnant women, developing an interactive medical expert system connecting to a wearable device for supporting pregnancy consultations based on fetal movement signals is essential. In this paper, we demonstrate the general architecture of MES-SPC (Medical Expert System for Supporting Pregnancy Consultations), which consist of data collection layer, data management layer and application service layer. The three highlighted parts in our system includes: (1) The development of an IoT-based wearable devices for automatic fetal movement signal acquisition and identification. (2) An interface collecting real-time status of pregnant women through online conversations led by doctors. (3) The construction of a self-updating knowledge base including case-based reasoning, rule-based inference and knowledge graph search to assist doctors for decision making.