Technologies

Expert knowledge about physiological monitoring, such as is used in anesthesia or the intensive care unit, is encoded into a set of rules. These rules are used in real time by the inference engine of an expert system. iKnow is designed to be easy to use and avoid the need for a knowledge engineer for rule creation. The rules are run in real time against inputs from clinical monitoring devices. iKnow can create a custom list of rules representing the individual clinician’s knowledge or developed collaboratively by an institution or professional organization to standardize group knowledge. The software generates programming code in a rule-based expert system language called JBoss Rules. The set of rules are then run, in real time at the patient’s bedside, against data generated by physiological monitors. Included within the iKnow program is a testing sub-application which allows a user to test the rules output against data in an Excel file. The data in this Excel file can be edited to force the rules to fire.

Limitations

System Requirements: To run iKnow you must have Java runtime environment version 6.0 or higher. This is a free download from Java.com. Please ensure this is updated should a problem running the application occur.

INSTALLATION: iKnow is currently available in zip format. After unzipping the folder to a suitable location the application is opened by running the file “iKnow2.x.jar” in the root directory. All other files and folders are required for execution so do not remove the jar file from this folder.