Subjective symptoms acquisition system in a health promotion system for the elderly

A previous report was concerned with the evaluation of quality of life usin g a Health Promotion System for the Elderly. In the present report, we desc ribe one part of that system: a subjective symptoms acquisition and reporti ng system. The main purpose of this system is to permit any physician or nurse to unif ormly employ questionnaires to acquire accurate subjective symptoms. This s ystem is applied in three steps. First, the subjective answers to 21 questi ons displayed on a personal computer are obtained. These answers correspond to the basic subjective symptoms. Second, if a basic subjective symptom is "positive", more detailed questions are automatically generated. Finally, clear sentences regarding subjective symptoms are generated and output as a "finding report" This information is helpful to physicians and nurses in their health-counse ling work. An artificial intelligence (Al) program based on "XpertRule" pro duces detailed questions which are generated by an interactive questionnair e using branching logical rules.