Sabah Traditional Chinese Medicine Database

Abstract

As technology grows, people tend to use or apply anything digitalized instead of printed, especially for references. This is because the printed form references are not easy to find. Even if the references are found successfully, it has already cost a lot of time, money, energy, etc. At the same time, people also put more emphasize on health issues. They are beginning to be more alert in fields that they have ignored before, such as traditional medicine and Chinese medicine. Based on these two points, it can be said that the effort of transforming Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) from printed based reference into online reference as a database is a public beneficial effort. There are a lot of online TCM database outside of Malaysia, especially from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Those herbal remedies from overseas are somewhat different from the herbal remedies in Malaysia due to the habits and occurrences of the herbs. Through this project, it is hoped that this database will help the local people to discover and identify the herbs that they could find in the surrounding area. The objectives of this project are to identify the validity of the information of the Sabah TCM using mixed method, to develop the Sabah TCM database, and finally to evaluate the usability of the database designed using meCUE. The methodology used was 4D Appreciative Inquiry Model, which included discovery, dream, design, and destiny phases. The advantage of this model was to take a positive core to make any changes instead of finding the weaknesses of the project. Hopefully through the developed database, local Sabahan can take the advantage in identifying the proper usage of existing herbs in their surroundings.