| dc.description.abstract | Making appointments at health facilities is time consuming and tedious. In recent years, a lot of
research has been done to solve the scheduling problem in Hospitals. Much of this is towards
online appointment scheduling using Web based applications. This has led to further research
into use software agents. Over the past considerable amount of work have been done by using
software Agents in areas like m-commerce, telemedicine, and engineering among others. This
research aimed at solving the appointment scheduling problem by developing an Intelligent
Mobile-Phone based appointment system. In this project, the system aims at making
appointments using intelligent agents that negotiate amongst themselves for appropriate patient
appointments and doctor schedules and emergency situations. This is done with no input from
physical agents of patient and doctor. Other research objectives included analyzing existing
systems, designing a model and implement the model for the system. Before commencing of data
collection, extensive review of literature was done to understand how appointment management
is done in the hospital environment and to identify the best frameworks, technologies and
methodologies to use in order to accomplish the research objectives. The user centered design
approach was used so that users would fully be involved in the system development so as to fully
meet their needs. The purpose of User-Centered Design is to involve end users in the
development process of the product or system in a way that the prototypes and designs, and
finally the products or systems would meet the needs and requirements of the users as well as
possible. Under this process data collection techniques included document review, interviews,
observation and questionnaires. All these were given to the target users and data from the data
collection was categorized and analyzed to come up with system requirements. The findings of
the study show that many of the target users already own smart phones and a change in
appointment scheduling would be very good especially for the patients and administrators who
share the burden of poor scheduling methods more. The report shows evidence of
implementation of the system. One of the key findings is that given more time and resources, the
system can be scaled out to a bigger hospital environment and more hospital administration tasks
besides scheduling | en_US |
