Mobile Question System for TCM Data Collection

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an important role in eastern Asia for thousand years and keeps evolving steadily. In clinical practice, a treatment of the patients mainly relies on the differential diagnoses. While western medicine uses disease-based diagnosis, TCM emphasizes on patient-based diagnosis. In TCM, the patient's symptoms and signs are collected through four different methods: Inspection, Auscultation and Olfaction, Interrogation and Palpation. These symptoms and signs are interpreted into a diagnostic syndrome that often concludes a treatment for the patient. However, in the past, this process was normally done manually by TCM doctors and it was time consuming and tedious. There is a need to help TCM doctors to collect data easily and effectively. In this paper, we proposed a new mobile question system to collect the symptoms information from the patients before TCM doctors conduct clinical assessment. The system is lightweight, and it includes minicomputer (Raspberry Pi 4), tablets and Wi-Fi router. The prototype system was designed and implemented by collaborating with TCM doctors, and the current result was promising to be used in practice. In a near future, we expect to deploy the developed system in the hospital to collect large data, which can be further used to train machine learning models to predict syndromes to assist TCM diagnosis.