reiter@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Ehud Reiter) (02/28/91)
I was recently looking over a Ph.D thesis(*) that discussed (among other things) an evaluation of a medical expert system designed for rural Third-World areas. One claim the author made was that the expert system she looked at was so brittle that it could only be used by people with substantial medical intuition (so they could tell when the system's diagnosis was wildly incorrect) and also with substantial medical self-confidence (so they would be able to overrule the computer when they thought it was wrong). This meant, in particular, that the system could *not* be sent out to paramedics and nurses in remote villages, as some of these people were not very well trained. I was wondering if anyone else could share any experiences or shed any light on this problem, of the brittleness of current-day expert systems making them unusable in low-skilled areas in general, and Third World villages in particular. I have always thought that it would be really nice if we could use expert system technology to provide badly-needed expertise (medical and otherwise) in poor Third-World areas, but perhaps there are fundamental problems with achieving this dream. Ehud Reiter (e.reiter@edinburgh.ac.uk) (*) Forster, Mary Ekundayo Lucretia (1990). HEALTH INFORMATICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: AN ANALYSIS AND TWO AFRICAN CASE STUDIES. Ph.D thesis. Dept of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science. -- Ehud Reiter (e.reiter@edinburgh.ac.uk)