| Rule 1: Design an artifact (presented methodology) |
| The artifact, i.e., the methodology detailed in Section 2.2, is a tool aimed to help in the process for assessing the health status of patients prone to developing respiratory diseases. |
| Rule 2: Relevance of the problem |
| The assessment of the health status of patients liable to develop potential medical hypoxemia cases is nowadays a topic of vital importance, of undoubtable relevance because respiratory diseases are globally the fifth most relevant cause of death [1,2], and more especially during 2020 due to the pandemic situation caused by COVID-19. |
| Rule 3: Design evaluation |
| The application of a new methodology is demonstrated in the practical case shown in Section 3.1. |
| Rule 4: Contributions to the field of research |
| The contributions to the field of new expert systems applied in the context of decision-making support in medicine are presented in Section 4 and Section 5 of this article. |
| Rule 5: Rigor in the research |
| The conceptual development of the presented methodology has been defined in Section 2.1, as was its classification within the field of research. In the same way, the mathematical groundings of this work are supported on the use of fuzzy-logic inference systems, and the definition of the risk functions and their combinations has adhered at all times to the appropriate mathematical rigor. |
| Rule 6: Design as a search process |
| In Section 1, the methodology was framed within the state of the art of similar applications, observing its differential aspects. These differences are discussed in Section 4. |
| Rule 7: Communication of the research |
| In Section 4 and Section 5, the main contributions of the new method are presented, as well as the future lines of work. |
