A fuzzy decision support language for building mobile DSSs for healthcare applications

Recently, Fuzzy Logic has been proposed as the most suitable approach for profitably tackling uncertainty and vagueness in clinical guidelines, and providing a new mobile generation of Decision Support Systems. This paper presents an intuitive XML-based language, named Fuzzy Decision Support Language, for both configuring a fuzzy inference system and encoding fuzzy medical knowledge to be embedded into a mobile DSS. Such a language enables the encoding of: i) fuzzy medical knowledge, in terms of groups of positive evidence rules and fuzzy ELSE rules assembling all the negative evidence for a specific situation; ii) input and output data, respectively elaborated or produced by the fuzzy DSS, in order to provide meaningful and semantically well-defined advices. As a proof of concept, the proposed language has been applied to encode, into a mobile DSS, the medical knowledge required to remotely detect suspicious situations of sleep apnea or heart failure in patients affected by cardiovascular diseases. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2013.