The Development and Acceptance of Autism Advisory Expert System

Abstract

Autism is a neurodevelopment, psychological and behavioral disorder. It is a childhood disorder and diagnosing autism is a major issue as its symptoms can easily be confused with those of mental retardness. Successful intervention requires correct diagnosis. As the major issue faced in Pakistan is of proper diagnosis of the autistic children who are mostly misdiagnosed as mentally retarded and thus are unable to get the required treatment which can enable those children to live like a normal child. Despite autism being a major area of concern worldwide, no remarkable work is done in Pakistan as yet. The diagnoses of autism currently being done in Pakistan is based on manual procedures. It is the need of time to have automated systems for diagnosing these disorders instead of doing them manually. Therefore, we developed an expert system, on the requirement of the clinical psychologist, which can act intelligently and correctly diagnoses the subject on the basis of the characteristics/symptoms. It is an interview based system which works on the basis of the behavioral characteristics of autism that are incorporated into the system in the form of rules and facts. Rules and facts make the knowledge base of the system from which the decision is extracted by the inference engine depending on the user's data input. The result is generated on its basis that categorizes the subject as having autism or not and classifies the level of autism present. This expert system will facilitate the clinicians and the related professionals in diagnosing this disorder. And will also open new horizons for the further developments for autism in Pakistan.