Abstract
Expert system development has primarily been focused on applications designed to be run on personal computers. An expert system capable of diagnosing illness in livestock and accessible on low-end mobile phones in rural areas without strong cellular coverage could enable livestock owners living in such areas to access medical assistance for their animals which was previously inaccessible to them. An expert system capable of diagnosing illness in cattle was built upon the Drools rule engine, and a web-based interface was developed for it. This interface was designed to be useable on low-end mobile phones, given the constraints of screen resolution, processing capabilities, and the limited feature-set of their browsers, as well as in areas with poor cellular coverage. Under testing, the system was able to correctly diagnose a series of hypothetical test cases, and avoid diagnosing an illness under conditions in which it could not confidently do so. The interface of the system was tested on a variety of mobile browsers and was functional in each.