Reference: Kuilboer, M. CALIPER: Temporal Reasoning for the Monitoring of Children's Growth. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Medical Computer Science, July, 1994.
Abstract: The referral pattern of clinicians who monitor children's growth leads to an inefficient use of resources. Many healthy children are referred to a pediatric endocrinologist, whereas pathologically short or tall children are often referred too late. Methods exist that could improve this referral pattern. However, these methods have proved to be too cumbersome to use in daily practice since they require many calculations that have to be done by hand. In addition, many clinicians do not have the skills to interpret the temporal information upon which they have to base the decision to refer a child. This paper presents a decision-support system that applies temporal-reasoning techniques to the task of monitoring children's growth. It shows how an extensive task analysis determined the architecture of the system, and also show the potential and flexibility of a modular approach to the design of a system that solves a real-world problem.