Expert System to Detect the Level of Parental Stress in Online Learning by Using Forward Chaining Method

Abstract


Introduction
The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic or coronavirus disease all over the world disturb several aspects of people life, included the education system in Indonesia. This contagious virus was confirmed spreading in Indonesia on 2 nd March 2020. The government declared several regulations in order to reduce the transmission of this virus namely, physical distancing, movement restrictions, work from home, and study from home. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education and Culture issued Circular Letter Number 4 in 2020 concerning to education system implementation during COVID-19 pandemic namely to conduct teaching and learning process in online learning.
Online learning or remote learning is the most applicable method in teaching and learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to mitigate the transmission of the contagious COVID-19 [1]. It means that online learning is not an option, but it was a necessity method in this pandemic, thus the teaching and learning process can be conducted to avoid the learning loss. In fact, students need parental involvement while they are learning from home especially for elementary and junior high school students. The parents also need to monitor, support and motivate their children in online learning, even the parents should teach their elementary children too, so that their children will achieve good learning outcomes and socioemotional well-being [2]. In conclusion, the parents have a wider range of duties namely as a supervisor and homeschooling teaching besides doing the domestic works during the pandemic.
Online learning makes parents closer to their children since it will improve communication between them. However, online learning also becomes a challenge not only for teachers and students, but also for parents. Especially for parents who conducted working from home since it increase their burden during this pandemic. This condition makes parents have to do many works beyond their limits which lead to facing stress. Stress is a feeling of mental press and tension that could produce anxiety, negative emotions and feelings namely press, pain, sadness or serious psychological disorder [3] [4]. Stress could make someone's life unwell, damage social relationship in the family and cause several diseases namely depression, hypertension, sudden death and stroke that reduce the productivity and quality of life [5] [6].
There are many parents experiencing stress and depression due to their works and guide their children in online learning during COVID-19 pandemic. According to a study conducted by Alisma et al. that discussed working parents experienced stress during helping their children at home during pandemic, it was found that 87% of the respondents (75 respondents) experiencing parenting stress regarding to the difficulty in dividing their time in working and helping their children at home [7]. A research done by Johnson et al. found that parents have experienced worsen mental health issue due to COVID-19 pandemic namely, parental stress, burnout, anxiety and depression [8]. The incidental closure of schools and public facilities forced all parents pass new daily routines which challenge them to be full time parents, do home-schooling for their children at home while they are working from home too [9]. This transition seemed as mainly stressful for all parents that strive to defend the border between work, children and domestic duties that affected their lifestyle [10]. In conclusion, stress is unhealthy and could result in biological, psychological and social problems in someone's life or even can harms another people so that there is must be a solution to mitigate this condition. In addition, the parents should know how to solve their problems by determining their stress level from home.

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Based on the problem describes above, the researchers were encouraged to conduct a research entitled Expert System Application to Detect the Level of Parental Stress in Online Learning by Using Forward Chaining Method in Pekanbaru in 2021 in order to help the parents in determining their stress level and solve their problems too. According to Garuda Cyber Indonesia, expert system, the forward chaining is a method that performs forward tracking, starting from taking facts and ending with the conclusions. This forward chaining method starts from facts that are already known by the expert system then uses a user-defined premise which the premise is adjusted to the facts using a certain rule. This process will produce new facts which will be used to reach a final conclusion after there are no more rules that the premise match with the facts.
There are the steps that must be taken in creating a rule-based Forward Chaining System, namely: (a) Problem definition, (b) Defining Input Data Forward CHAINING System requires data beginning to start inference, (c) Defining Data Control Structure, (d) Initial Code Writing, e) System Testing, (f) Interface Design and (g) System Evaluation.
Several researches have investigated the use of Expert System and Forward Chaining on several topics. First, the study conducted by Nurcholis et al. who investigated the use of Expert System Application to diagnosed stress level experienced by the final year students that combined Certainty Factor Methods and android-based Forward Chaining method. The results of this study found that through manual calculations on one of the data obtained from 200 students achieve the same level of confidence, each confidence level was 97.97% and it was diagnosed with mild stress [11]. Furthermore, Levina and Birowo investigated the use of Forward Chaining method to determine the results of job stress screening. This design was create to conduct the screening of job stress based on knowledge from the experts to detect risk and facilitate consultation between users and experts. This study concluded that the application made by the researcher can decide the symptoms of job stress risk [12]. In addition, Farajullah et al. had done a research about Expert System to detect anxiety by using web-based Forward Chaining Method. The results of this study produced a web-based Expert System to diagnose anxiety through the use Forward Chaining method. The result of Alpha test showed that this Expert System application was appropriate to use to detect anxiety independently [13].
Among the previous studies done by the researchers discussed about Expert System and Forward Chaining method, a research about Expert System application to detect the level of parental stress in Online learning by using Forward Chaining Method was still limited and needed. In order to fill this gap, the researchers conducted a study on expert system to detect the parental stress level in online learning to identify and measure the parental stress level by using the Forward Chaining method where the system was designed and implemented based on Desktop by using basic programming language .

Methods
This study was aimed to creating Expert System application by using Forward Chaining method which this method performs forward tracking that started from taking facts and ended with conclusion.

Data Collection
The data were collected through questionnaire that consisted of 30 questions or premises. The questionnaires were written in Bahasa Indonesia to anticipate language barriers among the respondents and it easily understood by the respondents. The respondents were chosen by using random sampling technique. The respondents were 150 parents in Pekanbaru who have educational backgrounds; elementary school (4 respondents), junior high school (6 respondents), high school (120 respondents), associate degree (11 respondents), bachelor degree (9 respondents). There were 123 respondents do not work, and 27 respondents were working parents. This researched was conducted from 17th November 2021 until 7th January 2022.

Analysis
Knowledge of psychology is very important to understand so that there are no errors in diagnosis. The importance of knowledge about psychology also affects the information that will be conveyed to users as learning materials and the introduction of stress levels of parents in dealing with online learning. A psychologist as an expert has limitations such as fatigue and the costs to be incurred are also relatively expensive for just consulting. Therefore, based on the analysis of the problem above, this system was expected to be a choice of alternative solutions to assist in understanding the condition of parental stress levels and provide information in the form of appropriate handling in dealing with stress.
A. Stress Indicator The sources of knowledge of this expert system consist of symptoms that experienced by each parent. The symptoms obtained from various sources of information such as books, journals, the internet, as well as from interviews with an expert she is the alumnus of Psychology at the State Islamic University), Dianita Pratiwi. Stress based on the level and the value that determines the category of stress, namely; normal with a scale of 0-149, mild stress 150-199, moderate stress 200-299, severe stress more than 300 and table 2 contains 30 symptoms of stress disease where the weight value is determined by experts and published book. B. Knowledge Representation After the data collection process was completed, next the data was represented into a knowledge base and the rules base which was then coded, organized and described in the form of a decision tree so that was becomes a systematic form. By using a decision tree, the researchers could easily see and identify the relationship between personality types and their characteristics. Based on the results of the knowledge representation from the decision table and decision tree that have been made, the rules or production rules were obtained which were usually written in if-then form (IFTHEN). Next, the System Algorithm was created to determine the stress level of parents during the pandemic.

System Design
To create a system design application that can be described as follows: A. UML (Unfied Modeling Languange) UML is a global form of software development that is built using objectoriented programming techniques. The UML tools used are Use Case diagrams, Activity diagrams, Sequence diagram and Class diagram.  Detailed design was needed to describe the workflow of a system in detail. With the construction of this detailed design, the shape of the application display would be known namely the main page, main menu view, symptoms menu, result menu, solution menu, etc.

Programming
After carrying out the design process on the next application, the process of making applications that have been designed in the previous stage was implemented into the PHP and MySQL programming languages to prepare basic data. After the design was implemented, the next stage was a trial to test the suitable program.

Implementation
In the implementation stage, the features in the expert system were tested to measure the stress of parents in online learning during the pandemic. At this stage, the entire interface and its features would be displayed and how to use the expert system

System View
In this application there is a login menu that contains a username and password which is useful for maintaining the security of users or admins who want to use the system which can be seen from the following picture: In this menu there are users and admins who will use the application, each of which  This consultation menu displays several symptoms determined by the researchers which the symptoms data were obtained from journals and experts. This symptom menu was filled in according to the symptoms experienced by the user to get the results that were categorized to normal, mild stress, moderate stress and severe stress level. After the users chose the symptoms, the diagnostic result will appear as shown in the picture above. The diagnostic result can be saved and the results will be entered in the history menu. This consultation menu displays several symptoms determined by the researchers which the symptoms data were obtained from journals and experts. This symptom menu was filled in according to the symptoms experienced by the user to get the results that were categorized to normal, mild stress, moderate stress and severe stress level. After the users chose the symptoms, the diagnostic result will appear as shown in the picture above. The diagnostic result can be saved and the results will be entered in the history menu. There are several levels of stress, namely normal levels which mean no serious problems occur, mild stress levels that may experience pain but are not so serious. The level of moderate stress in this level means that the user experiences pain but can still control it and the level of severe stress which is defined in the category of illness that requires help from a psychologist to overcome it.
2) Symptoms Data Figure 14. Stress Symptoms There are some displays in the symptom menu in which there are several symptoms that are managed by the admin which these symptoms can be removed or some other symptoms can be added.
3) Data Rule Next, there is the rule menu in which there are symptoms, levels and solutions where the data is obtained from experts so that the results are more valid.
XAMPP data with the results obtained from 150 respondents who have educational backgrounds; elementary school (4 respondents), junior high school (6 respondents), high school (120 respondents), associate degree (11 respondents), bachelor degree (9 respondents).There were 123 respondents do not work, and 27 respondents were working parents. The findings showed that from 150 respondents or parents there JAIA -Journal Of Artificial Intelligence And Applications Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2022, pp. 23-32 ISSSN: XXXX-XXXX, DOI: XX.XXXXX 31 were 22% or 33 respondents were at normal level, 6% or 9 respondents were at mild level of stress, 8% or 12 respondents were at moderate level of stress, and 64% or 96 respondents were at severe level of stress. 3.2. System Testing At this stage, trials and assessments were carried out to 30 parents through the questionnaires. It was conducted on November 17, 2021 until January 7, 2022 to find out the extent to which this website meets the needs of users with the assessment and results seen in the following table: In conclusion, the majority of the respondents agree that this expert system application can be used to detect parental stress level in online learning during the pandemic. They agreed that the website is interesting, easy to use, understandable, useful, and detect their stress level appropriately. By combining the Expert System and Forward Chaining method in the application, the respondents or users are convenient since they can detect their stress level easily via the application. This finding was in line with the studies conducted by Simamora & Irina and Levina & Birowo who found that Expert System and Forward Chaining method can detect the stress level of people [14].

Conclusion
This Expert System application can be used to detect the parental stress level in online learning during COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the respondents agreed that this application was convenient to use since they can detect their stress level easily. It was also expected through the use of this expert system application, parents not only detect earlier their stress level but also can achieve solution of their stress to avoid the negative impact of it. The researchers recommend to further researchers to find more symptoms of stress level and develop application that can be used by all people, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic.