A Mobile Phone-Based Expert System for Disease Diagnosis

Medicine is one of the areas that has benefited from the use of artificial intelligence since the advent of machine intelligence. Different expert systems for diagnosing diseases have been developed; however, they are either standalone or Web-based systems. This puts a vast majority of Africans in general and Nigerians in particular at a disadvantage, because of computer literacy, accessibility, and usage are very low in this region of the world. Recent advances in the capabilities of mobile phones and increased usage, however, have opened up new opportunities for innovative and complex applications that can be accessed via mobile phones. This chapter presents a disease diagnosis system that can be accessed via mobile phones to cater to the needs of the vast majority of users in places where healthcare is inadequate.