A Project Report Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Award the Degree of Master of Science in Embedded and Mobile Systems of The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology
Family is a basic unit in society where traditionally, parents raise their children and family
bonds survive longer and provide a primary sense of belonging. It has been observed that it
become difficult when extended family become complex to find distant relatives using
traditional approaches this is due to rural-urban migration and residential mobility, which has
been weakened family relationship. Several researchers have developed systems to help
relatives in discovering their family relationships using genealogical data, nevertheless, these
systems may provide false-positive findings when there is lack of information. In Tanzania the
genealogical sites have insufficient individual’s family information for family discovery. The
purpose of this paper is to present a developed mobile based application for discovering family
relationships with no use of genealogical data and use of rule-based system to identify the type
of relationship with a person. Both primary and secondary data collection methods were used
to collect data and analyzed using R-studio. The research revealed that rule-based system can
easily discover family relationships, and families grow when people interact with the mobile
application (MyFam). The system was validated with users, where results emphasized its
efficiency as a discovery tool with performance of 40% in user experience, 40% in system
functionalities and 55% in system interface. The contribution of this study is to provide a
mobile application that can be used in many countries for discovering family members
relationships. In addition, due to efficacy of the rule-based system, any relationship can be
inferred simply and reliably based on how family relationships are named.