MatES: Web-based Forward Chaining Expert System for Maternal Care
  The solution to prevent maternal complications are known and preventable by
trained health professionals. But in countries like Ethiopia where the patient
to physician ratio is 1 doctor to 1000 patients, maternal mortality and
morbidity rate is high. To fill the gap of highly trained health professionals,
Ethiopia introduced health extension programs. Task shifting to health
extension workers (HEWs) contributed in decreasing mortality and morbidity rate
in Ethiopia. Knowledge-gap has been one of the major challenges to HEWs. The
reasons are trainings are not given in regular manner, there is no midwife,
gynecologists or doctors around for consultation, and all guidelines are
paper-based which are easily exposed to damage. In this paper, we describe the
design and implementation of a web-based expert system for maternal care. We
only targeted the major 10 diseases and complication of maternal health issues
seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The expert system can be accessed through the use
of web browsers from computers as well as smart phones. Forward chaining
rule-based expert system is used in order to give suggestions and create a new
knowledge from the knowledge-base. This expert system can be used to train HEWs
in the field of maternal health.
  Keywords: expert system, maternal care, forward-chaining, rule-based expert
system, PHLIPS
