Abstract

This research proposes a method to provide visually impaired persons with better medical services and to mitigate their difficulties in taking medicines in their daily lives. Normally, pharmaceutical information are distributed in a form of printed materials, but it is not accessible by those who are visually impaired. Since persons who are visually impaired by accidents or diseases are required to take more types of medicines compared to other handicapped persons, and thus it is an important matter to let them have appropriate medicines at the right time. Although there are several web sites which are run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare providing pharmaceutic information, the information on those web sites are duplicated and some of the menus are similar, and thus giving users difficulties and discomfort in finding appropriate pharmaceutical information. Since ontology can define and describe the resource in an information system more clearly, in this research, an ontology consists of pharmaceutical information and knowledge on medicines is constructed to give patients more precise information more efficiently. Also, a service in which users can have voice guidance on pharmaceutical information retrieve from the ontology-based information system by contacting RFID sticker on the medicine to the reader.