🚀 go-pugleaf

[I posted this to comp.ai a few months ago, and got very little in the way of
responses.  I thought I'd try again in this group -- Ehud]

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 this dream is fundamentally
unachievable.

						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)