Migraine Project Home Page (1991-1994)

The Migraine project is an interdisciplinary project funded by the National Library of Medicine at the Intelligent System Laboratory (Computer Science Dept. University of Pittsburgh). The migraine project is concerned with the design and development of a patient education system for migraine patients. The project goal is to increase the overall effectiveness of physicians' time, and thus the quality of health care, by improving the information exchange between physicians and patients in clinical settings. In contrast to many other knowledge-based systems, our system's design is based on empirical data on actual information needs. We used ethnographic techniques to observe explanations actually given in clinic settings, and to conduct interviews with migraine sufferers and physicians.

The Migraine system consists of three main components:

  1. an interactive history-taking module that collects information from patients prior to each visit, builds a patient model, and summarizes the patients' status for their physicians;
  2. an intelligent explanation module that produces an interactive information sheet containing explanations in everyday language that are tailored to individual patients, and responds intelligently to follow-up questions about topics covered in the information sheet;
  3. an interaction manager that presents the interactive information sheet on the screen and manages the subsequent interaction with the patient.


Migraine Project People

Migraine Project Papers

Relevant Documents:

Knowledge base (a/t-boxes)

Relevant WWW Sites:


carenini@cs.pitt.edu