Mobile Medicine: Providing Drug Related Information through Natural Language Queries via SMS

Although the idea of mobile medical information systems is not new, most of the current systems operate as standalone programs with intermittent connectivity on high end mobile phones or PDAs. In a rural setting however, few people possess such expensive devices. The information regarding drugs is available on various Web sites but this information does not reach people at the time of medical emergencies. Moreover lack of doctors often forces people to take advice from paramedics, who may not be very qualified. In such situations the information on drugs and diseases would allow both the patient and the medic to cross check the diagnosis and the prescribed medicines. In this paper we explore the viability and present our system implementation to handle drug information related queries via SMS. We identify various classes into which drug information questions can be broken and pass the query through various modules to retrieve answers from the drug knowledge sources.