In the design of the new application, the aim was to build a whole series of new functionalities not developed in the original
isokinetics machine software, with the aim of providing better decision-making support. These functionalities targeted preliminary data analysis (data validity, curve morphology, simple comparative analysis) and also included a significant improvement of the isokinetics machine user interface.
To create this decision support system, we opted to design an expert system (Caraça-Valente, Lopez-Chavarrías, & Montes,2000). To do this, we had access to an expert in the domain with several years of experience running isokinetics tests on top-competition sportspeople and other patients.
The ES works as follows (Fig. 2, left). The data gathered by the isokinetics machine are transformed and formatted before being stored in a test database.
Then a cleaning and expert pre-processing component is run to prepare the data for the expert analysis performed by a KBS that contains expert functions and rules. Finally, a visualization module displays the exercises and the expert
analysis results for the user.