scholarly journals Using Traditional Chinese Medicine Ideas as a Mechanism to Engage People in Health Awareness

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donglei Song ◽  
Yu Xia ◽  
Rusi Wang ◽  
Hao Xu

Improving health awareness is essential to health and healthcare sustainability. How to arouse attention to the health of people and encourage them to attend to healthcare progress so that we can reduce the costs of promoting healthcare by achieving more with less effort remains to be explored. In this paper, we provide a simplified health management app, called iTongue, with a basis in traditional Chinese medicine. People use iTongue to take pictures of their tongues to have a general idea of their health. We realize automated tongue image diagnosis using machine learning techniques to establish the relationship between the tongue image features and the cold or hot ZHENG (traditional Chinese medicine syndrome) in traditional Chinese medicine by learning through examples and assisting people to engage in health management. The results show that health management interaction based on traditional Chinese medicine has a positive influence on improving people’s attention to their health, encouraging them to participate in health management activities and develop the habit of caring about their health over the long term. In the future, we could consider using this kind of traditional Chinese medicine idea as a means of publicity to engage people in healthcare and to assist healthcare sustainability development.

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ratchadaporn Kanawong ◽  
Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi ◽  
Tao Ma ◽  
Dong Xu ◽  
Shao Li ◽  
...  

ZHENG, Traditional Chinese Medicine syndrome, is an integral and essential part of Traditional Chinese Medicine theory. It defines the theoretical abstraction of the symptom profiles of individual patients and thus, used as a guideline in disease classification in Chinese medicine. For example, patients suffering from gastritis may be classified as Cold or Hot ZHENG, whereas patients with different diseases may be classified under the same ZHENG. Tongue appearance is a valuable diagnostic tool for determining ZHENG in patients. In this paper, we explore new modalities for the clinical characterization of ZHENG using various supervised machine learning algorithms. We propose a novel-color-space-based feature set, which can be extracted from tongue images of clinical patients to build an automated ZHENG classification system. Given that Chinese medical practitioners usually observe the tongue color and coating to determine a ZHENG type and to diagnose different stomach disorders including gastritis, we propose using machine-learning techniques to establish the relationship between the tongue image features and ZHENG by learning through examples. The experimental results obtained over a set of 263 gastritis patients, most of whom suffering Cold Zheng or Hot ZHENG, and a control group of 48 healthy volunteers demonstrate an excellent performance of our proposed system.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Changbo Zhao ◽  
Guo-Zheng Li ◽  
Chengjun Wang ◽  
Jinling Niu

As a complementary and alternative medicine in medical field, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has drawn great attention in the domestic field and overseas. In practice, TCM provides a quite distinct methodology to patient diagnosis and treatment compared to western medicine (WM). Syndrome (ZHENG or pattern) is differentiated by a set of symptoms and signs examined from an individual by four main diagnostic methods: inspection, auscultation and olfaction, interrogation, and palpation which reflects the pathological and physiological changes of disease occurrence and development. Patient classification is to divide patients into several classes based on different criteria. In this paper, from the machine learning perspective, a survey on patient classification issue will be summarized on three major aspects of TCM: sign classification, syndrome differentiation, and disease classification. With the consideration of different diagnostic data analyzed by different computational methods, we present the overview for four subfields of TCM diagnosis, respectively. For each subfield, we design a rectangular reference list with applications in the horizontal direction and machine learning algorithms in the longitudinal direction. According to the current development of objective TCM diagnosis for patient classification, a discussion of the research issues around machine learning techniques with applications to TCM diagnosis is given to facilitate the further research for TCM patient classification.


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