Customer Stories

The goal of the 'Expert System for Stress Management' is to mimic the role played by a psychologist to provide a virtual consultancy, i.e. a virtual psychologist. Its domain is restricted to the area of stress management, which is a complex study and a field of science by itself.

The system embodies three main functions consisting of diagnosis, remedies and education. As stress 'can only be managed to be treated', the system is equipped with an active monitoring mechanism to track on individual progress using quantifiable analysis. All aspects of the system in terms of its contents, flow, sequence and the various approaches employed for diagnosis, remedies and education has been verified with counseling psychologist.

'Expert System for Stress Management' is a frame-based expert system with a forward-chaining inference technique. The systems uses it's own diagnosis model to aid the development. It embodies common OOP principles which speeds development time, boosts accuracy and at the same time it synchronizes well with the traditional forward-chaining inferencing technique. In essence, the model is a mix-and-match approach exploiting the prowess of both.

The system uses Visual Basic 5.0 (serving as a front-end) and Amzi! Prolog + Logic Server 4.1 (serving as a back-end). Prolog deals with all aspects related to NLP (natural language processing). It uses a Prolog DCG (Definite Clause Grammar) parser to read input streams from Visual Basic text box. It takes advantage of the features from the Amzi! Logic Server to realise an interaction between the two languages. Visual Basic on the other hand was used with great effect with respect to the system's interface, accessing and reporting features. The system uses an Access database to achieve this.

You can download the Virtual Psychologist which includes the Prolog source code.

by Sanath Sukumaran
Staffordshire University, U.K.
Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT)