Domain experts' knowledge-based intelligent decision support system in occupational shoulder and neck pain therapy

This research develops a fuzzy knowledge-based decision support system (FKBDSS) that measures and predicts the degree of severity of the work-related risk associated with shoulder and neck pain (SNP) that is a prevalent pain complaint in an occupational environment. Assessing the harshness of SNP is a dreary chore, since the risk factors are featured with imprecision, uncertainty and vagueness. Predicting SNP subjective risk level provides key decision support information tomedical practitioners in diagnosis. The objective involves knowledge acquisition performed through literature analysis, traditional and concept mapping interviews with domain experts comprising neurologist, orthopaedist, psychologist and physiotherapist to identify risk factors that include mechanical, physical and psychosocial categories. The determination of ranking the relative factor importance has accomplished using analytic hierarchy processing (AHP) analysis. The linguistic variables that qualify risk levels are quantified using fuzzy set theory (FST) that provides linguistic and numeric value outputs to predict the hazard level of SNP. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.