Design and Implementation of Situation-Aware Medical Tourism Service Search System

Abstract

Recently medical tourism is becoming more popular, as more people realize its benefits. The main benefits of health tourism include getting the opportunity to travel to an exotic destination and reaping potentially big monetary savings [8]. Therefore, Taiwan Medical Tourism Development Association (TMTDA) was established to research and hold relevant medical tourism activities in August 2007. In this paper, we propose a new Medical Tourism Service (NITS) recommend system, the designed Situation-Aware Medical Tourism Service Search System (SAMTS(3)), which provides the cooperation web-based platform for all related Mobile Users (MUs) and Medical Tourism Service Providers (MTSPs), could strengthen the ability of NITS suggestion. SAMTS(3) is a five-tier system composed of the MUs, UDDI Registries (UDDIRs), MTSPs, Medical Tourism Services Server (MTSS), and Database Server (DS). Using SOA, OWLS to build semantic web environment to inference user's medical requirements and search adaptive NITS and web services which are published in UDDI through the communication networks include internet and 3G/GPRS/GSM mobile networks. In this paper, we propose the specific Medical Tourism Stemming Mechanism (MTSM), Medical Ontology (MO), and Adaptive Medical Tourism Inference Module (AMTIM) combined Term Frequency - Inversed Document Frequency (TF - IDF), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) to reference the adaptable NITS to MUs.