An ontology-based expert system to generate therapy plans for children with disabilities and communication disorders

Nowadays there are no precise estimates about the number of persons (especially children) living with disabilities and communication disorders in the world. This situation becomes more complex in developing countries, where the World Health Organization (WHO) claims that only between 5 and 15% of children and adults with disabilities have the opportunity to access to assistive technologies. In the same way, a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) has a work overload, and must carry out several activities related with monitoring patients, designing therapy plans, preparing reports, providing couseling services, among others. On those grounds, in this paper we present an expert system able to automatically infer general intervention guidelines for children with disabilities and communication disorders. The system relies on ontologies and implements a semantic web environment to provide several services related with information querying, reports generation, inference of intervention strategies, etc. In order to populate the ontology and validate the system, we have used the clinical information of 152 real cases of patients of Cuenca, Ecuador and 1,005 speech-language therapy information elements.