Search results for: African database

Authors: Lethola Tshikose, Munyaradzi Katurura

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Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a critical role in improving daily healthcare processes. The South African healthcare organizations have adopted Information Systems to integrate their patient records. This has made it much easier for healthcare organizations because patient information can now be accessible at any time. The primary purpose of this research study was to investigate the best practices that can be applied to enhance patient security and confidentiality when using e-health systems in South Africa. Security and confidentiality are critical in healthcare organizations as they ensure safety in EHRs. The research study used an inductive research approach that included a thorough literature review; therefore, no data was collected. The research paper’s scope included patient data and possible security threats associated with healthcare systems. According to the study, South African healthcare organizations discovered various patient data security and confidentiality issues. The study also revealed that when it comes to handling patient data, health professionals sometimes make mistakes. Some may not be computer literate, which posed issues and caused data to be tempered with. The research paper recommends that healthcare organizations ensure that security measures are adequately supported and promoted by their IT department. This will ensure that adequate resources are distributed to keep patient data secure and confidential. Healthcare organizations must correctly use standards set up by IT specialists to solve patient data security and confidentiality issues. Healthcare organizations must make sure that their organizational structures are adaptable to improve security and confidentiality.

Keywords: E-health, EHR, security, confidentiality, healthcare

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Authors: Gunasekaran Raja, Kottilingam Kottursamy, Rajakumar Arul, Ramkumar Jayaraman, Krithika Sairam, Lakshmi Ravi

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The synchronization server maintains a dynamically changing cache, which contains the data items which were requested and collected by the mobile node from the server. The order and presence of tuples in the cache changes dynamically according to the frequency of updates performed on the data, by the server and client. To synchronize, the data which has been modified by client and the server at an instant are collected, batched together by the type of modification (insert/ update/ delete), and sorted according to their update frequencies. This ensures that the DCASH (Dynamic Cache Synchronization Algorithm for Heterogeneous Reverse Y synchronizing Mobile Database Systems) gives priority to the frequently accessed data with high usage. The optimal memory management algorithm is proposed to manage data items according to their frequency, theorems were written to show the current mobile data activity is reverse Y in nature and the experiments were tested with 2g and 3g networks for various mobile devices to show the reduced response time and energy consumption.

Keywords: mobile databases, synchronization, cache, response time

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Authors: Robert H. Bradley

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Many minority adolescents in the United States live in adverse circumstances that pose long-term threats to their well-being. A strong sense of personal control and self-efficacy can help youth mitigate some of those risks and may help protect youth from influences connected with deviant peer groups. Accordingly, it is important to identify conditions that help foster feelings of efficacy in areas that seem critical for the accomplishment of developmental tasks during adolescence. The purpose of this study is to examine two aspects of the home environment (modeling and encouragement of maturity, family companionship and investment) and their relation to three components of self efficacy (self efficacy in enlisting social resources, self efficacy for engaging in independent learning, and self-efficacy for self-regulatory behavior) in three groups of minority adolescents (Native American, African American, Latino). The sample for this study included 54 Native American, 131 African American, and 159 Latino families, each with a child between 16 and 20 years old. The families were recruited from four states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, and Oklahoma. Each family was administered the Late Adolescence version of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory and each adolescent completed a 30-item measure of perceived self-efficacy. Three areas of self-efficacy beliefs were examined for this study: enlisting social resources, independent learning, and self-regulation. Each of the three areas of self-efficacy was regressed on the two aspects of the home environment plus overall household risk. For Native Americans, modeling and encouragement were significant for self-efficacy pertaining to enlisting social resources and independent learning. For African Americans, companionship and investment was significant in all three models. For Latinos, modeling and encouragement was significant for self-efficacy pertaining to enlisting social resources and companionship and investment were significant for the other two areas of self-efficacy. The findings show that even as minority adolescents are becoming more individuated from their parents, the quality of experiences at home continues to be associated with their feelings of self-efficacy in areas important for adaptive functioning in adult life. Specifically, individuals can develop a sense that they are efficacious in performing key tasks relevant to work, social relationships, and management of their own behavior if they are guided in how to deal with key challenges and they have been exposed and supported by others who are competent in dealing with such challenges. The findings presented in this study would seem useful given that there is so little current research on home environmental factors connected to self-efficacy beliefs among adolescents in the three groups examined. It would seem worthwhile that personnel from health, human service and juvenile justice agencies give attention to supporting parents in communicating with adolescents, offering expectations to adolescents in mutually supportive ways, and in engaging with adolescents in productive activities. In comparison to programs for parents of young children, there are few specifically designed for parents of children in middle childhood and adolescence.

Keywords: family companionship, home environment, household income, modeling, self-efficacy

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Authors: Ermias A. Tegegn, Million Meshesha

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Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a major cause of death for most African countries. Ethiopia is one of the seriously affected countries in sub Saharan Africa. Previously in Ethiopia, having HIV/AIDS was almost equivalent to a death sentence. With the introduction of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART), HIV/AIDS has become chronic, but manageable disease. The study focused on a data mining technique to predict future living status of HIV/AIDS patients at the time of drug regimen change when the patients become toxic to the currently taking ART drug combination. The data is taken from University of Gondar Hospital ART program database. Hybrid methodology is followed to explore the application of data mining on ART program dataset. Data cleaning, handling missing values and data transformation were used for preprocessing the data. WEKA 3.7.9 data mining tools, classification algorithms, and expertise are utilized as means to address the research problem. By using four different classification algorithms, (i.e., J48 Classifier, PART rule induction, Naïve Bayes and Neural network) and by adjusting their parameters thirty-two models were built on the pre-processed University of Gondar ART program dataset. The performances of the models were evaluated using the standard metrics of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The most effective model to predict the status of HIV patients with drug regimen substitution is pruned J48 decision tree with a classification accuracy of 98.01%. This study extracts interesting attributes such as Ever taking Cotrim, Ever taking TbRx, CD4 count, Age, Weight, and Gender so as to predict the status of drug regimen substitution. The outcome of this study can be used as an assistant tool for the clinician to help them make more appropriate drug regimen substitution. Future research directions are forwarded to come up with an applicable system in the area of the study.

Keywords: HIV drug regimen, data mining, hybrid methodology, predictive model

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Authors: Alamrew Eyayu, Abebe Getahun, James Last Keyombe

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Demand for fish continued to grow worldwide while production from capture fisheries has decreased. In the Eastern African Region (EAR), the open-access nature of capture fisheries has resulted in illegal fishing. Within communities engaged in fishing, small-scale fisheries support food security strategies and sustain livelihoods. Despite the role of fisheries in EAR, inland fisheries are vulnerable to loss, and management solutions authorized for inland fisheries are inadequate. This review investigates production potential, challenges, opportunities, and management of inland fisheries in the EAR. It is therefore expected that in aquaculture promising areas, the EAR will turn to depend more on aquaculture to meet the extended needs and supply gaps created as a result of capture fisheries shortfalls. However, aquaculture is still in its infant stage in the region, and there exists no adequate aquaculture policy framework and funds in some EAR (e.g., Ethiopia, Somalia). Stakeholders at all levels should entertain the importance of fishery-based activities for food security in EAR. As a result, easily implemented and community-oriented fisheries legislative documents need to be prepared for advancing sustainable fisheries management. Legislative documents might consider techniques of continual catch statistics (consider small water bodies as much as possible) of inland fisheries and enforcing existing laws to manage illegal fishing activities to accustom sustainable development of inland capture fisheries.

Keywords: aquaculture, capture fisheries, East Africa, fisheries management

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Authors: Cagdas Agirdas

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Background: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires non-grandfathered private insurance plans, starting with plan years on or after September 23rd, 2010, to provide certain preventive care services without any cost sharing in the form of deductibles, copayments or co-insurance. This requirement may affect racial and ethnic disparities in preventive care as it provides the largest copay reduction in preventive care. Objectives: We ask whether the ACA’s free preventive care benefits are associated with a reduction in racial and ethnic disparities in the utilization of four preventive services: cholesterol screenings, colonoscopies, mammograms, and pap smears. Methods: We use a data set of over 6,000 individuals from the 2009, 2010, and 2013 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS). We restrict our data set only to individuals who are old enough to be eligible for each preventive service. Our difference-in-differences logistic regression model classifies privately-insured Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians as the treatment groups and 2013 as the after-policy year. Our control group consists of non-Hispanic whites on Medicaid as this program already covered preventive care services for free or at a low cost before the ACA. Results: After controlling for income, education, marital status, preferred interview language, self-reported health status, employment, having a usual source of care, age and gender, we find that the ACA is associated with increases in the probability of the median, privately-insured Hispanic person to get a colonoscopy by 3.6% and a mammogram by 3.1%, compared to a non-Hispanic white person on Medicaid. Similarly, we find that the median, privately-insured African American person’s probability of receiving these two preventive services improved by 2.3% and 2.4% compared to a non-Hispanic white person on Medicaid. We do not find any significant improvements for any racial or ethnic group for cholesterol screenings or pap smears. Furthermore, our results do not indicate any significant changes for Asians compared to non-Hispanic whites in utilizing the four preventive services. These reductions in racial/ethnic disparities are robust to reconfigurations of time periods, previous diagnosis, and residential status. Conclusions: Early effects of the ACA’s provision of free preventive care are significant for Hispanics and African Americans. Further research is needed for the later years as more individuals became aware of these benefits.

Keywords: preventive care, Affordable Care Act, cost sharing, racial disparities

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Authors: Greg Zimmerman

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Background: Major depression is a common illness that affects millions of people globally. It is the leading cause of disability and is projected to become the number one cause of the global burden of disease by 2030. Many of those who suffer from depression also suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Acupuncture has been shown to help depression. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of acupuncture in reducing the risk of IBS in patients with depression. Methods: We enrolled patients diagnosed with depression through the Taiwanese National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). Propensity score matching was used to match equal numbers (n=32971) of the acupuncture cohort and no-acupuncture cohort based on characteristics including sex, age, baseline comorbidity, and medication. The Cox regression model was used to compare the hazard ratios (HRs) of IBS in the two cohorts. Results: The basic characteristics of the two groups were similar. The cumulative incidence of IBS was significantly lower in the acupuncture cohort than in the no-acupuncture cohort (Log-rank test, p<0.001). Conclusion: The results provided real-world evidence that acupuncture may have a beneficial effect on IBS risk reduction in patients with depression.

Keywords: acupuncture, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, national health insurance research database, real-world evidence

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Authors: Mareli Fischer, Kevin G. F. Thomas

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Although Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent childhood neurobehavioural disorders, little empirical research has been published on its clinical presentation in Africa, and, globally, few studies evaluate ADHD intervention programs that emphasize parent training. Hence, Stage 1 of this research programme aimed to describe the functional impairment of South African children with ADHD, and also sought to investigate the influence of sociodemographic variables (e.g., sex, age, socioeconomic status, family environment) and clinical variables (e.g., ADHD subtype and comorbidity) on the degree of that impairment. We used the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview for Children and Adolescents as a diagnostic tool, and the Child Behavior Checklist, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and the Impairment Rating Scale as measures of functional impairment. Results from this stage of the research indicated that South African children and adolescents who meet diagnostic criteria for ADHD experience most functional impairment in the school domain, as well as in the area of social functioning. None of the measured sociodemographic variables had a significant detrimental or protective effect on how ADHD symptoms impacted on functioning. In terms of comorbidity, the presence of Major Depressive Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder were all associated with significantly impaired overall functioning. Stage 2 of the research programme aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a child-specific intervention that targeted the primary areas of impairment identified in Stage 1. Existing literature suggests that a positive parent-training programme, in the group format, is one of the best options for cost-effective and successful ADHD intervention. Hence, the intervention took that form. Parents were taught basic behaviour analysis concepts within a supportive group context. Evaluation of the intervention’s efficacy used many of the same measures as in Stage 1, but also featured semi-structured interviews with participants and naturalistic observation of parent-child interaction. We will discuss preliminary results of that evaluation. Studying functional impairment and designing intervention plans in this way will pave the way for evidence-based treatment plans for children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD.

Keywords: attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, children, intervention, parenting groups

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Authors: Rosa L. Figueroa, Joselyn A. Hernández

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During the last couple of years, the Ministry of Health have been developing new health policies in order to regulate and improve in benefit of the patient the pharmaceutical system in our country. However, there are still some deficiencies in how medicines have been accessed, distributed, and sold. Therefore, it is necessary to empower the patient by offering new instances to improve access to drug information. This work introduces ‘the bioequivalent’ a medical drug search tool created to increase both diffusion and getting information about the therapeutic equivalence of medicines for the patient. The development of the search tool started with a study on the availability of sources of drug information accessible to the patient where advantages and disadvantages were analyzed. The information obtained was used to feed the functional design of the new tool. The design of the new tool shows an external interface that includes a header, body, sidebar and footer. The header has a menu containing ‘Home,’ ‘Who we are,’ and ‘Mission and vision.’ The Body contains the medical drug search tool, and the Sidebar is for the user logging in. It could be anonym, registered user, as well as, administrator. Anonym user could only use the tool. Registered users could add some information on existing medicines in the database; however, adding information will be restricted and limited to specific items and subject to administrator approval because the information added must be endorsed by the Chilean Public Health Institute. On the other hand, the administrator will have all the privileges, including creating or deleting drugs or information about them. The Bioequivalent was tested on different mobile devices, and no fails have been found. Moreover, a small survey was answered by ten people who tested the tool, and all of them agree that the tool was useful to get information about bioequivalent drugs, and they would recommend the tool to others. Nevertheless, an 80% of people who tested the tool says it was easy to use, and a 70% indicates that additional help is not required. These results are evidence that ‘the Bioequivalent’ may contribute to the knowledge about the therapeutic bioequivalence and bioequivalent drugs existing in Chile. As future work, the tool will be developed to make it available to the public for a first testing stage in a more massive scenario.

Keywords: collaborative database, bioequivalent drugs, search tool, web platform

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Authors: Mohamed Moheyeldin Mahmoud

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Egypt suffers from a severe shortage of data and charts concerning the physical dimensions, measurements, qualities and consumer behavior. The shortage of needed information and appropriate methods has forced the Egyptian designer to use any other foreign standard when designing a product for the Egyptian consumer which has led to many problems. The urgently needed database concerning the physical specifications, measurements of the Egyptian consumers, as well as the need to support the Ergonomics given courses in many colleges and institutes with the latest technologies, is stated as the research problem. Descriptive analytical method relying on the compiling, comparing and analyzing of information and facts in order to get acceptable perceptions, ideas and considerations is the used methodology by the researcher. The research concludes that: 1. Good interaction relationship between users and products shows the success of that product. 2. An integration linkage between the most prominent fields of science specially Ergonomics, Interaction Design and Ethnography should be encouraged to provide an ultimately updated database concerning the nature, specifications and environment of the Egyptian consumer, in order to achieve a higher benefit for both user and product. 3. Chinese economic policy based on the study of market requirements long before any market activities should be emulated. 4. Using Ethnography supports the design activities creating new products or updating existent ones through measuring the compatibility of products with their environment and user expectations, While contracting a joint cooperation between military colleges, sports education institutes from one side, and design institutes from the other side to provide an ultimately updated (annually updated) database concerning some specifications about students of both sexes applying in those institutes (height, weight, etc.) to provide the Industrial designer with the needed information when creating a new product or updating an existing one concerning that category is recommended by the researcher.

Keywords: adapt, ergonomics, ethnography, interaction design

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Authors: Fantazi Walid, Ezzedine Tahar, Bargaoui Zoubeida

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This research presents the main ideas to implement an intelligent system composed by communicating wireless sensors measuring environmental data linked to drought indicators (such as air temperature, soil moisture , etc...). On the other hand, the setting up of a spatio temporal database communicating with a Web mapping application for a monitoring in real time in activity 24:00 /day, 7 days/week is proposed to allow the screening of the drought parameters time evolution and their extraction. Thus this system helps detecting surfaces touched by the phenomenon of drought. Spatio-temporal conceptual models seek to answer the users who need to manage soil water content for irrigating or fertilizing or other activities pursuing crop yield augmentation. Effectively, spatio-temporal conceptual models enable users to obtain a diagram of readable and easy data to apprehend. Based on socio-economic information, it helps identifying people impacted by the phenomena with the corresponding severity especially that this information is accessible by farmers and stakeholders themselves. The study will be applied in Siliana watershed Northern Tunisia.

Keywords: WSN, database spatio-temporal, GIS, web mapping, indicator of drought

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Authors: Rebecca Zahra, Joseph G. Vella, Ernest Cachia

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The notion of cloud computing is rapidly gaining ground in the IT industry and is appealing mostly due to making computing more adaptable and expedient whilst diminishing the total cost of ownership. This paper focuses on the software as a service (SaaS) architecture of cloud computing which is used for the outsourcing of databases with their associated business processes. One approach for offering SaaS is basing the system’s architecture on multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy allows multiple tenants (users) to make use of the same single application instance. Their requests and configurations might then differ according to specific requirements met through tenant customisation through the software. Despite the known advantages, companies still feel uneasy to opt for the multi-tenancy with data security being a principle concern. The fact that multiple tenants, possibly competitors, would have their data located on the same server process and share the same database tables heighten the fear of unauthorised access. Security is a vital aspect which needs to be considered by application developers, database administrators, data owners and end users. This is further complicated in cloud-based multi-tenant system where boundaries must be established between tenants and additional access control models must be in place to prevent unauthorised cross-tenant access to data. Moreover, when altering the database state, the transactions need to strictly adhere to the tenant’s known business processes. This paper focuses on the fact that security in cloud databases should not be considered as an isolated issue. Rather it should be included in the initial phases of the database design and monitored continuously throughout the whole development process. This paper aims to identify a number of the most common security risks and threats specifically in the area of multi-tenant cloud systems. Issues and bottlenecks relating to security risks in cloud databases are surveyed. Some techniques which might be utilised to overcome them are then listed and evaluated. After a description and evaluation of the main security threats, this paper produces a list of software requirements to ensure that proper security policies are implemented by a software development team when designing and implementing a multi-tenant based SaaS. This would then assist the cloud service providers to define, implement, and manage security policies as per tenant customisation requirements whilst assuring security for the customers’ data.

Keywords: cloud computing, data management, multi-tenancy, requirements, security

Procedia PDF Downloads 157

Authors: John Segars

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Built out of a real-world need to have better, more detailed, asset and infrastructure documentation, this project will lay out the case for using the database functionality of ArcGIS as a tool to track and maintain infrastructure location, status, maintenance and serviceability. Workflows and processes will be presented and detailed which may be applied to an organizations’ infrastructure needs that might allow them to make use of the robust tools which surround the ArcGIS platform. The end result is a value-added information system framework with a geographic component e.g., the spatial location of various I.T. assets, a detailed set of records which not only documents location but also captures the maintenance history for assets along with photographs and documentation of these various assets as attachments to the numerous feature class items. In addition to the asset location and documentation benefits, the staff will be able to log into the devices and pull SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) based query information from within the user interface. The entire collection of information may be displayed in ArcGIS, via a JavaScript based web application or via queries to the back-end database. The project is applicable to all organizations which maintain an IT infrastructure but specifically targets post-secondary educational institutions where access to ESRI resources is generally already available in house.

Keywords: ESRI, GIS, infrastructure, network documentation, PostgreSQL

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Authors: Seyoung Kim, Jeongmin Kim, Kwang Ryel Ryu

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A database that records average traffic speeds measured at five-minute intervals for all the links in the traffic network of a metropolitan city. While learning from this data the models that can predict future traffic speed would be beneficial for the applications such as the car navigation system, building predictive models for every link becomes a nontrivial job if the number of links in a given network is huge. An advantage of adopting k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) as predictive models is that it does not require any explicit model building. Instead, k-NN takes a long time to make a prediction because it needs to search for the k-nearest neighbors in the database at prediction time. In this paper, we investigate how much we can speed up k-NN in making traffic speed predictions by reducing the amount of data to be searched for without a significant sacrifice of prediction accuracy. The rationale behind this is that we had a better look at only the recent data because the traffic patterns not only repeat daily or weekly but also change over time. In our experiments, we build several different k-NN models employing different sets of features which are the current and past traffic speeds of the target link and the neighbor links in its up/down-stream. The performances of these models are compared by measuring the average prediction accuracy and the average time taken to make a prediction using various amounts of data.

Keywords: big data, k-NN, machine learning, traffic speed prediction

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Authors: Laetitia Fourie

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Dangerous myths and stereotypes contribute to the fact that persons living with albinism are amongst the most vulnerable groups in society. The prevalence of albinism varies around the world and the World Health Organization estimates that around 1 in 5000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa are affected by this genetic disorder. Persons who are living with the condition usually experience a lack of melanin in their skin, eyes and hair that results in possible physical impairments such as poor eyesight and skin cancers. Being affected by such disorders and consequently classified as an albino, give way for unequal treatment which ultimately requires safeguarding these persons against unfair discrimination - not only on the basis of their race and color (or lack thereof), but also on the basis of their disability. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa provides that everyone is equal before the law and prohibits unfair discrimination on the grounds of race, color and disability. This right is given effect to by the Employment Equity Act, which strives to eliminate unfair discrimination on similar grounds within any employment policy or practice. An essential non-discrimination measure that can be implemented in the labor market to achieve equality is the duty of reasonable accommodation that rests upon employers. However, reasonable accommodation is only introduced as an affirmative action measure in order to provide equal employment opportunities to the identified designated groups who include black people (defined to include Indians, Chinese and Colored), women and people with disabilities. Even though this duty exists, South African law does not elaborate on the scope of the duty, except for a Disability Code, which does not hold the force of law. Furthermore, in respect of applying affirmative action measures to people with disabilities, the law does not elaborate on the meaning of disability. Considering that persons living with albinism will find it difficult to show that they are black or disabled in order to be acknowledged as part of the designated groups, their access to reasonable accommodation will be limited to a great extent. This paper will aim to illustrate to which extent South African law currently fails to implement its international obligations as a State Party to the Conventions of the United Nations, and how these failures should be corrected in order to serve the needs of all South Africans, including albinos.

Keywords: albinism, disability, equality, South Africa, United Nations

Procedia PDF Downloads 189

Authors: Deenadayalan Govender

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In South Africa, similar to nations globally, the prevailing tangible link between people and the state is public infrastructure. Services delivered through infrastructure to the people and to the state form a critical enabler for social development in communities and economic development in the country. In this regard, infrastructure, being the backbone to a nation’s prosperity, ideally should be effectively maintained for seamless delivery of services. South African infrastructure is in a state of deterioration, which is leading to infrastructure dysfunction and collapse and is negatively affecting development of the economy. This infrastructure deterioration stems from deficiencies in maintenance practices and strategies. From the birth of South African democracy, government has pursued socio-economic transformation and the delivery of critical basic services to decrease the broadening boundaries of disparity. In this regard, the National Infrastructure Plan borne from strategies encompassed in the National Development Plan is given priority by government in delivering strategic catalytic infrastructure projects. The National Infrastructure Plan is perceived to be the key in unlocking opportunities that generate economic growth, kerb joblessness, alleviate poverty, create new entrepreneurial prospects, and mitigate population expansion and rapid urbanisation. Socio-economic transformation benefits from new infrastructure spend is not being realised as initially anticipated. In this context, South Africa is currently in a state of weakening economic growth, with further amassed levels of joblessness, unremitting poverty and inequality. Due to investor reluctance, solicitation of strategic infrastructure funding is progressively becoming a debilitating challenge in all government institutions. Exacerbating these circumstances further, is substandard functionality of existing infrastructure subsequent to inadequate maintenance practices. This in-depth multi-sectoral study into the state of infrastructure is to understand the principal reasons for infrastructure functionality regression better; furthermore, prioritised investigations into progressive maintenance strategies is focused upon. Resultant recommendations reveal enhanced maintenance strategies, with a vision to capitalize on infrastructure design life, and also give special emphasis to socio-economic development imperatives in the long-term. The research method is principally based on descriptive methods (survey, historical, content analysis, qualitative).

Keywords: infrastructure, maintenance, socio-economic, strategies

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Authors: Innocent Atuhe, Babra Nalwadda, Grace Mulyowa Kitunzi, Annabella Haninka Ejiri

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Background: Atopic Dermatitis (AD) is one of the most prevalent and growing chronic inflammatory skin diseases in African prisons. AD care is limited in African due to lack of information about the disease amongst primary care workers, limited access to dermatologists, lack of proper training of healthcare workers, and shortage of appropriate treatments. We designed and implemented the Prisons Telederma project based on the recommendations of the International Society of Atopic Dermatitis. Our overall goal was to increase access to dermatologist-led care for prisoners with AD through teledermatology in Uganda. We aimed to; i) to increase awareness and understanding of teledermatology among prison health workers; and ii) to improve treatment outcomes of prisoners with atopic dermatitis through increased access to and utilization of consultant dermatologists through teledermatology in Uganda prisons: Approach: We used Store-and-forward Teledermatology (SAF-TD) to increase access to dermatologist-led care for prisoners and prisons staff with AD. We conducted a five days training for prison health workers using an adapted WHO training guide on recognizing neglected tropical diseases through changes on the skin together with an adapted American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Childhood AD Basic Dermatology Curriculum designed to help trainees develop a clinical approach to the evaluation and initial management of patients with AD. This training was followed by blended e-learning, webinars facilitated by consultant Dermatologists with local knowledge of medication and local practices, apps adjusted for pigmented skin, WhatsApp group discussions, and sharing pigmented skin AD pictures and treatment via zoom meetings. We hired a team of Ugandan Senior Consultant dermatologists to draft an iconographic atlas of the main dermatoses in pigmented African skin and shared this atlas with prison health staff for use as a job aid. We had planned to use MySkinSelfie mobile phone application to take and share skin pictures of prisoners with AD with Consultant Dermatologists, who would review the pictures and prescribe appropriate treatment. Unfortunately, the National Health Service withdrew the app from the market due to technical issues. We monitored and evaluated treatment outcomes using the Patient Oriented Eczema Measure (POEM) tool. We held four advocacy meetings to persuade relevant stakeholders to increase supplies and availability of first-line AD treatments such as emollients in prison health facilities. Results: Draft iconographic atlas of the main dermatoses in pigmented African skin Increased proportion of prison health staff with adequate knowledge of AD and teledermatology from 20% to 80% Increased proportion of prisoners with AD reporting improvement in disease severity (POEM scores) from 25% to 35% in one year. Increased proportion of prisoners with AD seen by consultant dermatologist through teledermatology from 0% to 20% in one year. Increased the availability of AD recommended treatments in prisons health facilities from 5% to 10% in one year

Keywords: teledermatology, prisoners, reaching, un-reachable

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Authors: Parvaneh Mahmoudi, Ahmad Moeni, Seyed Mojtaba Khayam Nekoei, Mohsen Mardi, Mehrshad Zeinolabedini, Ghasem Hosseini Salekdeh

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Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is one of the most important spice and medicinal plants. The three-branch style of C. sativus flowers are the most important economic part of the plant and known as saffron, which has several medicinal properties. Despite the economic and biological significance of this plant, knowledge about its molecular characteristics is very limited. In the present study, we, for the first time, constructed a comprehensive dataset for C. sativus stigma through de novo transcriptome sequencing. We performed de novo transcriptome sequencing of C. sativus stigma using the Illumina paired-end sequencing technology. A total of 52075128 reads were generated and assembled into 118075 unigenes, with an average length of 629 bp and an N50 of 951 bp. A total of 66171unigenes were identified, among them, 66171 (56%) were annotated in the non-redundant National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database, 30938 (26%) were annotated in the Swiss-Prot database, 10273 (8.7%) unigenes were mapped to 141 Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway database, while 52560 (44%) and 40756 (34%) unigenes were assigned to Gen Ontology (GO) categories and Eukaryotic Orthologous Groups of proteins (KOG), respectively. In addition, 65 candidate genes involved in three stages of crocin biosynthesis were identified. Finally, transcriptome sequencing of saffron stigma was used to identify 6779 potential microsatellites (SSRs) molecular markers. High-throughput de novo transcriptome sequencing provided a valuable resource of transcript sequences of C. sativus in public databases. In addition, most of candidate genes potentially involved in crocin biosynthesis were identified which could be further utilized in functional genomics studies. Furthermore, numerous obtained SSRs might contribute to address open questions about the origin of this amphiploid spices with probable little genetic diversity.

Keywords: saffron, transcriptome, NGS, bioinformatic

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Authors: Kalkidan Worku, Eniyew Tegegne, Menichil Amsalu, Samuel Derbie Habtegiorgis

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Introduction: Because of the seasonal nature of the work, day laborers are exposed to risky sexual practices. Since the majority of them are living far away from their birthplace and family, they engage in unplanned and multiple sexual practices. These unplanned and unprotected sexual experiences are a risk for different types of sexual-related health crises. This study aimed to assess the pooled prevalence of risky sexual practices and its determinants among day laborers in Ethiopia. Methods: Online databases, including PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, African Journal of Online, Academia Edu, Semantic Scholar, and university repository sites, were searched from database inception until March 2023. PRISMA 2020 guideline was used to conduct the review. Among 851 extracted studies, ten articles were retained for the final quantitative analysis. To identify the source of heterogeneity, a sub-group analysis and I² test were performed. Publication bias was assessed by using a funnel plot and the Egger and Beg test. The pooled prevalence of risky sexual practices was calculated. Besides, the association between determinant factors and risky sexual practice was determined using a pooled odds ratio (OR) with a 95% confidence interval. Result: The pooled prevalence of risky sexual practices among day laborers was 46.00% (95% CI: 32.96, 59.03). Being single (OR: 2.49; 95% CI: 1.29 to 4.83), substance use (OR: 1.79; 95% CI: 1.40 to 2.29), alcohol intake (OR: 4.19; 95% CI: 2.19 to 8.04), watching pornographic (OR: 5.49; 95% CI: 2.99 to 10.09), discussion about SRH (OR: 4.21; 95% CI: 1.34 to 13.21), visiting night clubs (OR: 2.86 95% CI: 1.79 to 4.57) and risk perception (OR: 0.37 95% CI: 0.20 to 0.70) were the possible factors for risky sexual practice of day laborers in Ethiopia. Conclusions: A large proportion of day laborers engaged in risky sexual practices. Interventions targeting creating awareness of sexual and reproductive health for day laborers should be implemented. Continuous peer education on sexual health should be given to day laborers. Sexual and reproductive health services should be accessible in their workplaces to maximize condom utilization and to facilitate sexual health education for all day laborers.

Keywords: day laborers, sexual health, risky sexual practice, unsafe sex, multiple sexual partners

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Authors: S. Nandagopalan, N. Pradeep

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The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework for storing, analyzing, and extracting knowledge from two-dimensional echocardiographic images, color Doppler images, non-medical images, and general data sets. A number of high performance data mining algorithms have been used to carry out this task. Our framework encompasses four layers namely physical storage, object identification, knowledge discovery, user level. Techniques such as active contour model to identify the cardiac chambers, pixel classification to segment the color Doppler echo image, universal model for image retrieval, Bayesian method for classification, parallel algorithms for image segmentation, etc., were employed. Using the feature vector database that have been efficiently constructed, one can perform various data mining tasks like clustering, classification, etc. with efficient algorithms along with image mining given a query image. All these facilities are included in the framework that is supported by state-of-the-art user interface (UI). The algorithms were tested with actual patient data and Coral image database and the results show that their performance is better than the results reported already.

Keywords: active contour, Bayesian, echocardiographic image, feature vector

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Authors: Waheed O. Majekodunmi

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Climate change is a real global phenomenon and an unquestionable threat to our quest for a healthy and livable planet. It is now regarded as potentially the most monumental environmental challenge people and the planet will be confronted with over the next centuries. Expectedly, climate change mitigation was one of the central themes of COP 28. Despite contributing the least to climate change, Africa is and remains the hardest hit by the negative consequences of climate change including poor growth performance. Currently, it is being hypothesized that the high level of vulnerability and exposure to climate-related disasters, low adaptive capacity against global warming and high mitigation costs of climate change across the continent could be linked to the recent abysmal economic performance of African countries, especially in oil-producing countries where greenhouse gas emissions, is potentially more prevalent. This paper examines the impact of climate change on the economic performance of selected oil-producing countries in Africa using evidence from Nigeria, Algeria and Angola. The objective of the study is to determine whether or not climate change influences the economic performance of oil-producing countries in Africa by examining the nexus between economic growth and climate-related variables. The study seeks to investigate the effect of climate change on the pace of economic growth in African oil-producing countries. To achieve the research objectives, this study utilizes a quantitative approach by using historical and current secondary data sets to determine the relationship between climate-related variables and economic growth variables in the selected countries. The study employed numbers, percentages, tables and trend graphs to explain the trends or common patterns between climate change, economic growth and determinants of economic growth: governance effectiveness, infrastructure, macroeconomic stability and regulatory efficiency. Results from the empirical analysis of data show that the trends of economic growth and climate-related variables in the selected oil-producing countries are in the opposite directions as the increasing share of renewable energy sources in total energy consumption and the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the oil-producing countries did not translate to higher economic growth. Further findings show that annual surface temperatures in the selected countries do not share similar trends with the food imports ratio and GDP per capita annual growth rate suggesting that climate change does not impact significantly agricultural productivity and economic growth in oil-producing countries in Africa. Annual surface temperature was also found to not share a similar pattern with governance effectiveness, macroeconomic stability and regulatory efficiency reinforcing the claim that some economic growth variables are independent of climate change. The policy implication of this research is that oil-producing African countries need to focus more on improving the macroeconomic environment and streamlining governance and institutional processes to boost their economic performance before considering the adoption of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Keywords: climate change, climate vulnerability, economic growth, greenhouse gas emissions per capita, oil-producing countries, share of renewable energy in total energy consumption

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Authors: Shakila Singh

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This research was conducted at a selected South African university campus with women students who drink alcohol. The purpose of the study was to examine their perspectives on the role of alcohol in their lives, their understandings about women’s vulnerability to alcohol-related sexual risk and their strategies against these. The study draws on feminist principles and practices to challenge gendered inequalities that legitimate and facilitate violence against women. Recognising the danger of focusing on risk management in ways that place the burden of responsibility entirely on young women to prevent their violation, this article focuses on women students’ agency in managing risk while taking up opportunities for self-discovery. Participation was voluntary, and a student-researcher administered an open-ended questionnaire to 55 participants. The findings suggest that young women position alcohol- use as a common activity at university, and that it gives them much pleasure. They recognise that it is riskier for women and articulate valuable strategies to manage the risk to their sexual safety when drinking. These include drinking within supportive networks, avoiding financial dependence, and managing their alcohol intake. This article argues that alcohol at university is an integral part of expressions of gender and sexuality and that risk-taking is a normal part of university students’ lives. Consequently, arguments about equality need to consider risk-taking as part of young people’s lives and promote ways of managing alcohol-related risks, rather than imagining that alcohol can be avoided entirely.

Keywords: alcohol-related sexual risk, drinking at university, managing risk, women students

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Authors: Ibrahim Turfanda, Soniya Rai, Karan Vadher

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Objectives— The study aims to compare real-world adherence to and persistence with dulaglutide and liraglutide in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) initiating treatment in UAE. Methods— This was a retrospective, non-interventional study (observation period: 01 March 2017–31 August 2019) using the UAE Dubai e-Claims database. Included: adult patients initiating dulaglutide/liraglutide 01 September 2017–31 August 2018 (index period) with: ≥1 claim for T2D in the 6 months before index date (ID); ≥1 claim for dulaglutide/liraglutide during index period; and continuous medical enrolment for ≥6 months before and ≥12 months after ID. Key endpoints, assessed 3/6/12 months after ID: adherence to treatment (proportion of days covered [PDC; PDC ≥80% considered ‘adherent’], per-group mean±standard deviation [SD] PDC); and persistence (number of continuous therapy days from ID until discontinuation [i.e., >45 days gap] or end of observation period). Patients initiating dulaglutide/liraglutide were propensity score matched (1:1) based on baseline characteristics. Between-group comparison of adherence was analysed using the McNemar test (α=0.025). Persistence was analysed using Kaplan–Meier estimates with log-rank tests (α=0.025) for between-group comparisons. This study presents 12-month outcomes. Results— Following propensity score matching, 263 patients were included in each group. Mean±SD PDC for all patients at 12 months was significantly higher in the dulaglutide versus the liraglutide group (dulaglutide=0.48±0.30, liraglutide=0.39±0.28, p=0.0002). The proportion of adherent patients favored dulaglutide (dulaglutide=20.2%, liraglutide=12.9%, p=0.0302), as did the probability of being adherent to treatment (odds ratio [97.5% CI]: 1.70 [0.99, 2.91]; p=0.03). Proportion of persistent patients also favoured dulaglutide (dulaglutide=15.2%, liraglutide=9.1%, p=0.0528), as did the probability of discontinuing treatment 12 months after ID (p=0.027). Conclusions— Based on the UAE Dubai e-Claims database data, dulaglutide initiators exhibited significantly greater adherence in terms of mean PDC versus liraglutide initiators. The proportion of adherent patients and the probability of being adherent favored the dulaglutide group, as did treatment persistence.

Keywords: adherence, dulaglutide, effectiveness, liraglutide, persistence

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Authors: Benmessaoud Hassen

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We propose in this study to address the impact of socio-economic and environmental impact on the physical environment, especially their spatiotemporal dynamics in semi-arid and arid eastern Aurès. Including 11 municipalities, the study area spreads out over a relatively large surface area of about 60.000 ha. The hindsight is quite important and is determined by 03 days of analysis of environmental variation spread over thirty years (between 1987 and 2007). The multi-source data acquired in this context are integrated into a geographic information system (GIS).This allows, among other indices to calculate areas and classes for each thematic layer of the 4 layers previously defined by a method inspired MEDALUS (Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use).The database created is composed of four layers of information (population, livestock, farming and land use). His analysis in space and time has been supplemented by a validation of the ground truth. Once the database has corrected it used to develop the comprehensive map with the calculation of the index of socio-economic and environmental (ISCE). The map supports and the resulting information does not consist only of figures on the present situation but could be used to forecast future trends.

Keywords: impact of socio-economic and environmental, spatiotemporal dynamics, semi-arid environments, GIS, Eastern Aurès

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Authors: U. S. N. Raju, Kothuri Sai Kiran, Meena G. Kamal, Vinay Nikhil Pabba, Suresh Kanaparthi

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There is huge amount of lecture video data available for public use, and many more lecture videos are being created and uploaded every day. Searching for videos on required topics from this huge database is a challenging task. Therefore, an efficient method for video retrieval is needed. An approach for automated video indexing and video search in large lecture video archives is presented. As the amount of video lecture data is huge, it is very inefficient to do the processing in a centralized computation framework. Hence, Hadoop Framework for distributed computing for Big Video Data is used. First, step in the process is automatic video segmentation and key-frame detection to offer a visual guideline for the video content navigation. In the next step, we extract textual metadata by applying video Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology on key-frames. The OCR and detected slide text line types are adopted for keyword extraction, by which both video- and segment-level keywords are extracted for content-based video browsing and search. The performance of the indexing process can be improved for a large database by using distributed computing on Hadoop framework.

Keywords: video lectures, big video data, video retrieval, hadoop

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Authors: Maulana Ayoub Ali

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“Both Socialist as well as the capitalist in the economic systems have proven their failure to ensure economic justice that serves to benefit all in the society, both the rich and the poor. In particular, capitalism is currently causing a terrifying scenario by making the rich richer and the poor poorer” . In this paper, the author looks at the level of exploitation which is taking place to small and middle entrepreneurs (SME’s), government and private employees as well as large investors in East African countries who depends on interest-based loans which undermines their lives every day due to heavy monthly returns. Numbers of families have been evicted from their family premises and SME’s properties have been attached in the courts due to failure to return their loans timely. In fact, there are a lot of issues which have taken place on the ground which badly affected number of families socially and most importantly economically due to engagement in interest-based loans offered by commercial banks in East Africa. This paper looks on the alternative ways of eliminating interest-based loans to better lives of devastated Africans who are almost “dying” of heavy debts generated through higher interest loans. Reaching to that particular root the author has visited various literatures in a bid to deeply investigate and find out the best alternative mode of enabling African SME’s, businessmen and employees to benefit from the interest-free loans. The question is whether interest-free loans can be a long term solution towards poverty alleviation in East Africa generally and Tanzania in particular.

Keywords: interest-free loans, SME’s, financial institutions, poverty, east Africa

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Authors: Baljit Singh Khehra, Amar Partap Singh Pharwaha

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Clusters of Microcalcifications (MCCs) are most frequent symptoms of Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS) recognized by mammography. Least-Square Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) is a variant of the standard SVM. In the paper, LS-SVM is proposed as a classifier for classifying MCCs as benign or malignant based on relevant extracted features from enhanced mammogram. To establish the credibility of LS-SVM classifier for classifying MCCs, a comparative evaluation of the relative performance of LS-SVM classifier for different kernel functions is made. For comparative evaluation, confusion matrix and ROC analysis are used. Experiments are performed on data extracted from mammogram images of DDSM database. A total of 380 suspicious areas are collected, which contain 235 malignant and 145 benign samples, from mammogram images of DDSM database. A set of 50 features is calculated for each suspicious area. After this, an optimal subset of 23 most suitable features is selected from 50 features by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The results of proposed study are quite promising.

Keywords: clusters of microcalcifications, ductal carcinoma in situ, least-square support vector machine, particle swarm optimization

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Authors: G. A. Asciak, C. Camilleri, A. Rizzo

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The waste management in Malta is a national challenge. Coupled with Malta’s recent economic boom, which has seen massive growth in several sectors, especially the construction industry, drastic actions need to be taken. Wood waste, currently being dumped in landfills, is one type of waste which has increased astronomically. This research study aims to carry out a thorough examination on the possibility of using this waste as a biomass resource and adopting a waste-to-energy technology in order to generate electrical energy. This study is composed of three distinct yet interdependent phases, namely, data collection from the local SMEs, thermal analysis using the bomb calorimeter, and generation of energy from wood waste using a micro biomass plant. Data collection from SMEs specializing in wood works was carried out to obtain information regarding the available types of wood waste, the annual weight of imported wood, and to analyse the manner in which wood shavings are used after wood is manufactured. From this analysis, it resulted that five most common types of wood available in Malta which would suitable for generating energy are Oak (hardwood), Beech (hardwood), Red Beech (softwood), African Walnut (softwood) and Iroko (hardwood). Subsequently, based on the information collected, a thermal analysis using a 6200 Isoperibol calorimeter on the five most common types of wood was performed. This analysis was done so as to give a clear indication with regards to the burning potential, which will be valuable when testing the wood in the biomass plant. The experiments carried out in this phase provided a clear indication that the African Walnut generated the highest gross calorific value. This means that this type of wood released the highest amount of heat during the combustion in the calorimeter. This is due to the high presence of extractives and lignin, which accounts for a slightly higher gross calorific value. This is followed by Red Beech and Oak. Moreover, based on the findings of the first phase, both the African Walnut and Red Beech are highly imported in the Maltese Islands for use in various purposes. Oak, which has the third highest gross calorific value is the most imported and common wood used. From the five types of wood, three were chosen for use in the power plant on the basis of their popularity and their heating values. The PP20 biomass plant was used to burn the three types of shavings in order to compare results related to the estimated feedstock consumed by the plant, the high temperatures generated, the time taken by the plant to produce gasification temperatures, and the projected electrical power attributed to each wood type. From the experiments, it emerged that whilst all three types reached the required gasification temperature and thus, are feasible for electrical energy generation. African Walnut was deemed to be the most suitable fast-burning fuel. This is followed by Red-beech and Oak, which required a longer period of time to reach the required gasification temperatures. The results obtained provide a clear indication that wood waste can not only be treated instead of being dumped in dumped in landfill but coupled.

Keywords: biomass, isoperibol calorimeter, waste-to-energy technology, wood

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Authors: Andrew Enaifoghe

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The study examined the role of public management development in enhancing public service delivery in the South African local government. The study believes that the ultimate empowerment of the third tier sphere of governments in South Africa remains the instrument required to enhance both national and continental development. This over the year has been overwhelmed with problems and imbalance related to ethical practice, accountability and the functional local government system and the machinery itself. The study finds that imbalances are being strengthened by a lack of understanding and unanimity as to what a public management development in a democratic system is and how it should work to achieve the dividends of democracy in delivering public goods. Studies indicated that the magnitudes are widespread corruption and misrepresentations of government priorities; both of which weaken the ability of governments to enhance broad-based economic growth and social well-being of the people. This study addressed the problem of public management and accountable local government. The study indicates the need for citizens’ participation in the decision-making process in delivering public service in South Africa and how its accountability mechanism supports good governance. The study concludes that good and ethical watersheds in South Africa have since reached such proportions that social pressure, the pressure from the government and various institutions have to re-consider where they stand regarding ethics, ethical behaviour, accountability and professionalism in delivering public goods to the people at the local municipal government.

Keywords: accountability, development, democratic system, South Africa

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Authors: Jefrey Pilusa, Tumisang Seodigeng

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This research discusses a South African case study for the potential of utilizing refuse-derived fuel (RDF) obtained from non-burn treatment of health care risk waste (HCRW) as potential feedstock for green energy production. This specific waste stream can be destroyed via non-burn treatment technology involving high-speed mechanical shredding followed by steam or chemical injection to disinfect the final product. The RDF obtained from this process is characterised by a low moisture, low ash, and high calorific value which means it can be potentially used as high-value solid fuel. Due to the raw feed of this RDF being classified as hazardous, the final RDF has been reported to be non-infectious and can blend with other combustible wastes such as rubber and plastic for waste to energy applications. This study evaluated non-burn treatment technology as a possible solution for on-site destruction of HCRW in South African private and public health care centres. Waste generation quantities were estimated based on the number of registered patient beds, theoretical bed occupancy. Time and motion study was conducted to evaluate the logistics viability of on-site treatment. Non-burn treatment technology for HCRW is a promising option for South Africa, and successful implementation of this method depends upon the initial capital investment, operational cost and environmental permitting of such technology; there are other influencing factors such as the size of the waste stream, product off-take price as well as product demand.

Keywords: autoclave, disposal, fuel, incineration, medical waste

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