An ontological clinical decision support system based on clinical guidelines for diabetes patients in Sri Lanka

Health professionals should follow the clinical guidelines to decrease healthcare costs to avoid unnecessary testing and to minimize the variations among healthcare providers. In addition, this will minimize the mistakes in diagnosis and treatment processes. To this end, it is possible to use Clinical Decision Support Systems that implement the clinical guidelines. Clinical guidelines published by international associations are not suitable for developing countries such as Sri Lanka, due to the economic background, lack of resources, and unavailability of some laboratory tests. Hence, a set of clinical guidelines has been formulated based on the various published international professional organizations from a Sri Lankan context. Furthermore, these guidelines are usually presented in non-computer-interpretable narrative text or non-executable flow chart formats. In order to fill this gap, this research study finds a suitable approach to represent/organize the clinical guidelines in a Sri Lankan context that is suitable to be used in a clinical decision support system. To this end, we introduced a novel approach which is an ontological model based on the clinical guidelines. As it is revealed that there are 4 million diabetes patients in Sri Lanka, which is approximately twenty percent of the total population, we used diabetes-related guidelines in this research. Firstly, conceptual models were designed to map the acquired diabetes-related clinical guidelines using Business Process Model and Notation 2.0. Two models were designed in mapping the diagnosis process of Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes, and Gestational diabetes. Furthermore, several conceptual models were designed to map the treatment plans in guidelines by using flowcharting. These designs were validated by domain experts by using questionnaires. Grüninger and Fox’s method was used to design and evaluate the ontology based on the designed conceptual models. Domain experts’ feedback and several real-life diabetic scenarios were used to validate and evaluate the developed ontology. The evaluation results show that all suggested answers based on the proposed ontological model are accurate and well addressed with respect to the real-world scenarios. A clinical decision support system was implemented based on the ontological knowledge base using the Jena Framework, and this system can be used to access the diabetic information and knowledge in the Sri Lankan context. However, this contribution is not limited to diabetes or a local context, and can be applied to any disease or any context

Towards using ICT to enhance flow of information to aid farmer sustainability in Sri Lanka

Farmers need information at all stages of the farming life cycle to make optimal decisions. The required information includes not only prior knowledge but also real time (dynamic) information such as market prices and current production levels. Some valuable information needed by the farmers is produced by government organizations and is available in different locations in different formats. Although farmer is the most important stakeholder in agriculture, there has not been much effort to provide the essential information to farmers on a real time basis. This lack of information is creating many difficulties for farmers as they are not being able to make the correct decisions relating to their farming activities. Through field studies we have identified information required by farmers at various stages of the farming cycle and official sources where this information is available. Next we developed an information flow model that connects various information sources to farmers&rsquo; information needs. Based on these findings we are now developing a mobile phone based information system to deliver the required information to farmers in real time.<br /

Digitally-enabled crop disorder management process based on farmer empowerment for improved outcomes : a case study from Sri Lanka

We have developed a system facilitated by a mobile artefact to effectively identify crop disorder incidents and manage them using recommended control measures. This work overcomes the limitations of the existing attempts by using digital technology to empower farmers to identify crop disorders rather than replace them with automated techniques. Our approach empowers farmers by providing the information in context for them to identify crop disorders. The developed solution can identify most of the crop disorders instantaneously, irrespective of the crop or other factors that make crop disorder identification complicated. For the rest, it provides a mechanism to carry out a manual identification with the help of subject experts. The solution was deployed among paddy farmers in Sri Lanka to understand how well this could assist them in identifying and managing crop disorders. The system was able to identify 70.8% of the crop disorder incidents reported by the farmers and provided them with the relevant control measures. Farmers’ perceptions of various usability aspects of the solution revealed that the application of agrochemicals and expenses associated with agrochemicals were significantly reduced. It was also observed that the yield quality and quantity and overall revenue have increased compared to the previous seasons

Farmers as sensors : a crowdsensing platform to generate agricultural pest incidence reports

Over the years, the food produced for human consumption is lost or affected due to many factors. Among these, pest/disease incidence is one significant factor contributing to crop losses. Hence, early identification of the presence of pest/disease incidence is essential to manage crop losses. In Sri Lanka, farmers identify a pest/disease incidence by mainly relying on the input given by agricultural experts, and sometimes they rely on fellow farmers, pesticide dealers, and even on their own experience. The current approaches followed by the farmers to communicate the pest/disease symptoms to agricultural experts are not appropriate and resulted in many incorrect choices made by the farmers. In this paper, we discuss about an extension we proposed for a mobile application we developed for farmers in Sri Lanka called Govi Nena. This extension aimed to capture the conditions concerning pest/disease symptoms and climate present in the field to assist agricultural experts in the decisionmaking process. We consider each farmer as a sensor to capture information such as symptoms present in the crop, distribution of symptoms, affected parts of the plant, and growth stage of it. The enhanced version of the application was given to agricultural experts to understand their feedback in regards to this. The feedback was positive, and now, we have undertaken to deploy the application among several farmers based in Sri Lanka for testing purposes

User needs-driven enrichment of ontology : a case study in Sri Lankan Agriculture

This study describes the mobile-based user needs-driven knowledge management system that supports the decision making process by considering user needs and preferences. Agriculture is one of the domains, in which, users seek specific information and knowledge relevant to their needs rather than searching and accessing general information from the Web, books, magazines or other information sources. Thus, the conceptualized solution was created by applying participatory sensing, natural language processing and ontology theories and techniques in a novel way in order to satisfy the user needs. The user-centered agriculture ontology that has been developed in our previous work is extended to make an up-to-date knowledge base by capturing user needs and preferences through participatory sensing. The methods of ontology evolution from unstructured data were analyzed to build a technique to enrich the user-centered ontology. The Modified Delphi method is used for verifying the correctness and relevancy of the ontology and the application-based evaluation is applied for checking the functional correctness of the system

Harnessing mobile pervasive computing to enhance livelihood processes : farmer response to a mobile agriculture information system

Mobile technology is a remarkable milestone in the current advances in Information and Communication Technologies. It is pervasive and is evolving rapidly across nations. This mobile revolution had opened up new avenues and opportunities, to design innovative solutions to support livelihood activities of people in developing countries. Agriculture in Sri Lanka is a sector which had not been fully exploited to identify the potential of developing innovative solutions to support farming activities. Timely and relevant agriculture information is essential for farmers to make effective decisions which would in turn empower them. Providing the right information at the right time required for farming activities is a major challenge as this information is available in different places in different formats. We developed a mobile agriculture information system and deployed among thirty farmers due to the high mobile penetration reported among farmers in Sri Lanka. The deployed artefact was field tested to ensure its suitability to support their daily decision making process. The sample group strongly endorsed mobile artefact and mentioned the potential of harnessing the agriculture knowledge

A holistic mobile based information system to enhance farming activities in Sri Lanka

Information technology has proved to be the most vital part in sustainable development of any domain. In the next era, mobile technologies will create a greater impact on the humans due to inbuilt sensors and processing capabilities. Thus, by identifying this trend we have designed a holistic mobile based system to aid the information needs of farmers throughout the farming life cycle. This system is aimed at addressing the information gap among farmers and other stakeholders of the agriculture sector such as traders, government and private organizations. While diagnosing the problem domain, it was identified that, not only the static information such as pest and diseases, but also the dynamic information such as market prices, should be made available to the farmer to take correct decisions at the right time. Thus, our system would gather data from different sources to create better linkages among the stakeholders of the agriculture domain while increasing the information transparency of the farming life cycle. Further, the intended design will open up opportunities for predictive models to strengthen the decision making process

Analysis of ontology quality dimensions, criteria and metrics

Ontology quality assessment needs to be performed across the ontology development life cycle to ensure that the ontology being modeled meets the intended purpose. To this end, a set of quality criteria and metrics provides a basis to assess the quality with respect to the quality requirements. However, the existing criteria and metrics defined in the literature so far are messy and vague. Thus, it is difficult to determine what set of criteria and measures would be applicable to assess the quality of an ontology for the intended purpose. Moreover, there are no well-accepted methodologies for ontology quality assessment as the way it is in the software engineering discipline. Therefore, a comprehensive review was performed to identify the existing contribution on ontology quality criteria and metrics. As a result, it was identified that the existing criteria can be classified under five dimensions namely syntactic, structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social. Moreover, a matrix with ontology levels, approaches, and criteria/metrics was presented to guide the researchers when they perform a quality assessment

Towards an agriculture information ecosystem

Stakeholders of a domain in their day today activities generate information which is a valuable resource. To obtain full value of this information it should reach right people at the right time. To investigate how this can be achieved we developed an information flow model for agriculture domain by mapping information needed by stakeholders to information generated by others using set of aggregation and disaggregation operators. We found majority of information needs of stakeholders can be fulfilled by applying these operators to information produced by some other stakeholders thus creating a direct benefit to encourage sharing information. This information flow model had many similarities to biological ecosystems where nutrient cycles and energy flows are replaced by information flows. Based on this information ecosystem model we are developing a mobile based information system for farmers in Sri Lanka. Like biological ecosystems information ecosystems will also need time to grow and become sustainable

Farmer response towards the initial agriculture information dissemination mobile prototype

Timely and relevant agriculture information is essential for farmers to make effective decisions. Finding the right approach to provide this information to empower farmers is vital due to the high failure rate in current agricultural information systems. As most farmers now have mobile phones we developed a mobile based information system. We used participatory action research methodology to enable high farmer participation to ensure sustainability of the solution. The initial version of the application based on the preliminary studies focused on the crop choosing stage of the farming life cycle. This initial prototype was evaluated with a sample of farmers to check their willingness in adapting such technology, usefulness of provided information and usability of the application in order to support their day to day decision making process. The sample group strongly endorsed the various aspects of the prototype application and provided valuable insights for improvement