Design and Development of a Prototype Knowledge Base System for Hiv Pretest Counseling
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Date
2006-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
HIV/AIDS is a pandemic that has claimed and continues to threaten the lives of millions
around the globe. In the effort to answer the question "what works?", Voluntary Counseling
and Testing (VCT) has appeared as a potentially effective intervention to prevent
transmission of HIV by changing sexual behavior, and also in enabling individuals to make
informed decision on whether or not to be tested. At the present time, VCT is the focal
preventive tool in Ethiopia that is also being used as a means of reducing the stigma
associated with the disease. The continued efforts to encourage people to come forward for
voluntary testing are, however, often hindered due to the stigma and taboo against open
discussion about sex and sexually transmittable diseases.In an attempt to address such problems, the objective of this thesis work is to look into the
possibility of applying the expert system technology to VCT by developing a prototype
expert system that can imitate the services of a VCT cowlselor. One of the methods used for
achieving this goal is acquiring knowledge through unstructured intervi,e ws from five experts
that are purposely selected from the domain (VCT counselors). The VCT centers were
selected based on prior acquaintance with the VCT counselors, availability of transportation
to and from the centers, availability of the counselors to give feed-back and close follow-up
to the research work, attitude towards the new idea of developing an automated counselor,
and so on. Secondary sources of knowledge, such as standard VCT guidelines from UNWHO
and Centre for Disease Control were also used to gather knowledge about the domain.
This knowledge is then represented into a form that can be understood by a computer using
production rules and mapping these rules into an expert system shell called Knowledge
ProGold Version 3.0. The resulting prototype, Voluntary Counseling Expert System on
HIV/AIDS (VCE-AIDS), includes a user-interface that serves to display questions, accept
input from the user, and present the resulting decision of the system.VCE-AIDS has been tested for performance on IS users and achieved quite an encouraging
result of about 90% accuracy (86.6%). VCE-AIDS is, however, limited to the pre-HIV testing
session of the counseling process and is recommended to be developed into a full fledged
system that includes post-HIV -test counseling.
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Information Science