Abstract
HIV still constitutes a major public health problem in Africa, where the highest incidence and prevalence of the disease can be found in many rural areas, with multiple indigenous languages being used for communication by locals. In many rural areas of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in South Africa, for instance, the most widely used languages include Zulu and Xhosa, with only limited comprehension in English and Afrikaans. Health care practitioners for HIV diagnosis and treatment, often, cannot communicate efficiently with their indigenous ethnic patients. An informatics tool is urgently needed to facilitate these health care professionals for better communication with their patients during HIV diagnosis. Here, we apply fuzzy logic and speech technology and develop a fuzzy logic HIV diagnostic system with indigenous multi-lingual interfaces, named Multi-linguAl HIV indigenouS fuzzy logiC-based diagnOstic sysTem (MAVSCOT). This HIV multilingual informatics software can facilitate the diagnosis in underprivileged rural African communities. We provide examples on how MAVSCOT can be applied towards HIV diagnosis by using existing data from the literature. Compared to other similar tools, MAVSCOT can perform better due to its implementation of the fuzzy logic. We hope MAVSCOT would help health care practitioners working in indigenous communities of many African countries, to efficiently diagnose HIV and ultimately control its transmission.
Highlights
HIV is one of the diseases currently affecting many sub-Saharan African countries
HIV still constitutes a major public health problem in Africa, where the highest incidence and prevalence of the disease can be found in many rural areas, with multiple indigenous languages being used for communication by locals
Criteria used for the literature search and for the inclusion of HIV data include targeting research articles published between 2001 and 2016 that contain symptomatic data about People Living With HIV (PLWHIV), with specific search phrases “HIV”, “HIV Symptoms”, “commonly reported symptoms of HIV”, and “Symptoms”
Summary
HIV is one of the diseases currently affecting many sub-Saharan African countries. Out of the 36.7 million people living with HIV globally, sub-Saharan Africa has an estimated 25.6 million, accounting for two-thirds of the global total [1]. It has been estimated that only 60% of people living with HIV know their status [2]. This is disturbing, as the remaining 40% have not been able to access proper HIV testing services.
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