Decision Support System Development for the Treatment of Maladaptive Behaviors.

The Mental Retardation-Expert (MR-E) is a microcomputer based expert decision support system that provides practitioners with state of the art assistance in the treatment of aggressive, self injurious, and destructive behaviors displayed by individuals with mental retardation or developmental disabilities. This system, based on human experts and the current scientific literature, leads the practitioner through a functional assessment of the problem behaviors. Based on that analysis, the clinician is provided a variety of treatment suggestions, emphasizing the development of adaptive skills, which may be incorporated into the individualized treatment protocol. This paper focuses on the collection of decision support rules from human experts and on the assemblage of additional information, from the current behavioral treatment literature, to bolster and enhance those rules. (15 references) (Author)