Health Financing In Ghana: Perceived Factors That Help Healthcare Facility Providers to Render Services to Clients of National Health Insurance Scheme

Health financing has become a universal concern especially for developing countries. Ghana has introduced National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) programme for its residents. This paper explores the perceived factors that help the accredited Healthcare Facility Providers (HFPs) to render services to the clients who have registered with the NHIS. The design used a survey which relied on questionnaire that provided six factors for respondents to rank according to how important they perceive the factor to help them in serving the clients of NHIS. These factors were selected based on the researcher’s own interactions with the HFPs. Claims payment was ranked as the most important factor, followed by staff at post, patients support facilities, services rendered, culture at the facility and facility location. These factors were discussed and recommendations were made to help HFPs serve the clients of NHIS. Keywords: National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Healthcare Facility Providers (HFPs),   Community-based Health Planning Service (CHPS

Dynamic Context Awareness of Universal Middleware based for IoT SNMP Service Platform

This study focused on the Universal Middleware design for the IoT (Internet of Things) service gateway for the implementation module of the convergence platform. Recently, IoT service gateway including convergence platform could be supported on dynamic module system that is required mounting and recognized intelligent status with the remote network protocol. These awareness concepts support the dynamic environment of the cross-platform distributed computing technology is supported by these idea as a Universal Middleware for network substitution. Distribution system commonly used in recent embedded systems include CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), RMI (Remote Method Invocation), DCE (Distributed Computing Environment) for dynamic service interface, and suggested implementations of a device object context. However, the aforementioned technologies do not support each standardization of application services, communication protocols, and data, but are also limited in supporting inter-system scalability. In particular, in order to configure an IoT service module, the system can be simplified, and an independent service module can be configured as long as it can support the standardization of modules based on hardware and software components. This paper proposed a design method for Universal Middleware that, by providing IoT modules and service gateways with scalability for configuring operating system configuration, may be utilized as an alternative. This design could be a standardized interface provisioning way for hardware and software components as convergence services, and providing a framework for system construction. Universal Middleware Framework could be presented and dynamic environment standardization module of network protocols, various application service modules such as JINI (Apache River), UPnP (Universal Plug & Play), SLP (Service Location Protocol) bundles that provide communication facilities, and persistence data module. In this IoT gateway, management for based Universal Middleware framework support and available for each management operation, application service component could be cross-executed over SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) version 1, version 2, and version 3. The way of SNMP extension service modules are conducted cross-support each module and independent system meta-information that could be built life cycle management component through the MIB (Management Information Base) information unit analysis. Therefore, the MIB role of relation with the Dispatcher applied to support multiple concurrent SNMP messages by receiving incoming messages and managing the transfer of PDU (Protocol Data Unit) between the RFC 1906 network in this study. Results of the study revealed utilizing Universal Middleware that dynamic situations of context objects with mechanisms and tools to publish information could be consisted of IoT to standardize module interfaces to external service clients as a convergence between hardware and software platforms

On the Design of Ambient Intelligent Systems in the Context of Assistive Technologies

The design of Ambient Intelligent Systems (AISs) is discussed in the context of assistive technologies. The main issues include ubiquitous communications, context awareness, natural interactions and heterogeneity, which are analyzed using some examples. A layered architecture is proposed for heterogeneous sub-systems integration with three levels of interactions that may be used as a framework to design assistive AISs.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2001-1868-C0

Supporting service discovery, querying and interaction in ubiquitous computing environments.

In this paper, we contend that ubiquitous computing environments will be highly heterogeneous, service rich domains. Moreover, future applications will consequently be required to interact with multiple, specialised service location and interaction protocols simultaneously. We argue that existing service discovery techniques do not provide sufficient support to address the challenges of building applications targeted to these emerging environments. This paper makes a number of contributions. Firstly, using a set of short ubiquitous computing scenarios we identify several key limitations of existing service discovery approaches that reduce their ability to support ubiquitous computing applications. Secondly, we present a detailed analysis of requirements for providing effective support in this domain. Thirdly, we provide the design of a simple extensible meta-service discovery architecture that uses database techniques to unify service discovery protocols and addresses several of our key requirements. Lastly, we examine the lessons learnt through the development of a prototype implementation of our architecture

Will 5G See its Blind Side? Evolving 5G for Universal Internet Access

Internet has shown itself to be a catalyst for economic growth and social equity but its potency is thwarted by the fact that the Internet is off limits for the vast majority of human beings. Mobile phones---the fastest growing technology in the world that now reaches around 80\% of humanity---can enable universal Internet access if it can resolve coverage problems that have historically plagued previous cellular architectures (2G, 3G, and 4G). These conventional architectures have not been able to sustain universal service provisioning since these architectures depend on having enough users per cell for their economic viability and thus are not well suited to rural areas (which are by definition sparsely populated). The new generation of mobile cellular technology (5G), currently in a formative phase and expected to be finalized around 2020, is aimed at orders of magnitude performance enhancement. 5G offers a clean slate to network designers and can be molded into an architecture also amenable to universal Internet provisioning. Keeping in mind the great social benefits of democratizing Internet and connectivity, we believe that the time is ripe for emphasizing universal Internet provisioning as an important goal on the 5G research agenda. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges in utilizing 5G for global access to the Internet for all (GAIA). We have also identified the major technical issues involved in a 5G-based GAIA solution and have set up a future research agenda by defining open research problems

CREOLE: a Universal Language for Creating, Requesting, Updating and Deleting Resources

In the context of Service-Oriented Computing, applications can be developed following the REST (Representation State Transfer) architectural style. This style corresponds to a resource-oriented model, where resources are manipulated via CRUD (Create, Request, Update, Delete) interfaces. The diversity of CRUD languages due to the absence of a standard leads to composition problems related to adaptation, integration and coordination of services. To overcome these problems, we propose a pivot architecture built around a universal language to manipulate resources, called CREOLE, a CRUD Language for Resource Edition. In this architecture, scripts written in existing CRUD languages, like SQL, are compiled into Creole and then executed over different CRUD interfaces. After stating the requirements for a universal language for manipulating resources, we formally describe the language and informally motivate its definition with respect to the requirements. We then concretely show how the architecture solves adaptation, integration and coordination problems in the case of photo management in Flickr and Picasa, two well-known service-oriented applications. Finally, we propose a roadmap for future work.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2010, arXiv:1007.499

Who actually wants to use ‘the killer app’? Perceptions of location based services in the young and old

This paper describes the results of two qualitative case studies that assessed the perceptions of Location Based Services (LBS) with two UK user groups: a family with a behaviour-disordered teenager, and a group of older adults. The family (n=2) and older adults (n=13) were interviewed individually after experiencing LBS. The data from the interviews were thematically analysed with the aid of Nvivo software, and organised into themes to better understand attitudes towards LBS technology. Whilst both groups had the opportunity to use, adapt to and experience LBS, perceptions of ‘cool’ and ‘trendiness’ affected judgments of it, and their subsequent usage intentions. The family adopted the LBS system fully, with the device aiding navigation, and ultimately developing trust. Their teenage son also embraced the technology, aided in part by the unobtrusive and ‘trendy’ nature of the mobile phone the LBS was deployed on. In contrast, the older adults felt that LBS could not assist them in any way, and were concerned about the potential for invasions of privacy. This work highlights clear generational differences in the acceptance of LBS, and suggests consideration is needed for the future design of LBS to ensure suitability for the user