On Designing Intelligent Response System for Medicine

Abstract

Since early 1970’s several groups both in Japan and in the United States have worked on a new approach to computer-aided clinical decision making. The special feature which distinguishes these works from the traditional ones is that they use physicians’ empirical knowledges as the bases of the computer decision logics, and that these knowledges are incorporated into the system as a kind of data instead of as a part of the program themselves. Special care was also paid for flexible man-machine conversational interaction in order to raise the acceptability of the systems. This paper reports a comparative and experimental field study on the usefulness of some of these systems, which we now call intelligent response systems. Although these systems are different among each others in their problem domains, design considerations, and developmental stages, the study still gives several important insights into such systems. Some design criteria and development strategy that are useful for future development of such systems are also mentioned.