Web-Based Expert System for Personalized Psychotherapeutic Counselling

Abstract

Sri Lanka has one of the highest suicidal rates in the world. It has been found that these cases were caused mostly as a result of mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety. A recent study conducted at the Rajarata University showed that approximately 5-10% of the Sri Lankan population suffer from some form of mental health condition that require treatment.(Jaufer, 2016) This study aims to examine the development of a Web-Based Expert System which will provide Personalized Psychotherapeutic Counselling for anyone in any location. If everyone who has a suffering problem and have no one to share their grievances could use the proposed system, then everyone will have a hope and happiness in their lives and the suicidal rate would decrease significantly. The main objective of developing this system is to address all the drawbacks of the currently available face to face counselling system, while this system mainly focuses the Sri Lankan community. This system will perform as a platform to connect clients who need mental health advices, with licensed counsellors of Sri Lanka. The significance of the proposed web based counselling system is, that it will present a set of standard and psychologically approved questions to the clients before receiving the counselling service. By using Prolog Logical Programming Language, the answers provided by the client will be analyzed, and then the system will predict the area of the problem of that particular client. Then, the system will direct the client to the relevant counsellor that has specialized on that relevant area. Finally, the client could use a preferred method of communication facilitated by the system, to communicate with the counsellor. The system will also use encryption methods to ensure confidentiality of the conversations carried out between clients and counsellors. The proposed system will be a fully integrated version comprised of a Web Application, Android Mobile Application, Short Message Sending (SMS) gateway and a Payment gateway.