Tobacco cessation programs and factors associated with their effectiveness in the Middle East: A systematic review.

In Middle East countries, the average prevalence of tobacco use is relatively high. This systematic review aimed to explore different tobacco cessation programs provided in the Middle East, identify healthcare professionals providing these programs, and the factors associated with their effectiveness. A systematic review was conducted using an electronic search of PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, ProQuest, and Web of Science, bibliographic databases between 24 January 2021 and 7 March 2021, to identify all relevant studies. The keywords used were 'tobacco cessation' and 'Middle East'. The review was undertaken applying the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines (PRISMA). Based on the study types, several quality assessment tools including the Cochrane risk of bias tool for randomized controlled trials, MINORS for quasi-experimental studies, NIH for cross-sectional studies, NIH for pre-post studies, and CASP for cohort studies, were used. Among the 512 studies screened, only 30 were included in this review. Our systematic review identified different cessation methods, with some employing both behavioral change and pharmacological methods, and some utilizing only one method. Physicians are believed to be the most common providers of cessation programs, with only a few other healthcare professionals doing so. The results of this review revealed that several factors are associated with the effectiveness of tobacco cessation programs in the Middle East including individual, interpersonal, community, organizational, policy, and environmental. Future research should focus on examining the sociocultural and economic factors that might influence tobacco cessation programs. The included studies were of average to poor quality, highlighting the need to conduct highquality studies. The findings provide evidence to encourage the development of multilevel programs to improve the efficacy of tobacco cessation initiatives in the Middle East

Financial feasibility of end-user designed rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse systems for high water use households

© 2017, The Author(s). Water availability pressures, competing end-uses and sewers at capacity are all drivers for change in urban water management. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) and greywater reuse (GWR) systems constitute alternatives to reduce drinking water usage and in the case of RWH, reduce roof runoff entering sewers. Despite the increasing popularity of installations in commercial buildings, RWH and GWR technologies at a household scale have proved less popular, across a range of global contexts. For systems designed from the top-down, this is often due to the lack of a favourable cost-benefit (where subsidies are unavailable), though few studies have focused on performing full capital and operational financial assessments, particularly in high water consumption households. Using a bottom-up design approach, based on a questionnaire survey with 35 households in a residential complex in Bucaramanga, Colombia, this article considers the initial financial feasibility of three RWH and GWR system configurations proposed for high water using households (equivalent to >203L per capita per day). A full capital and operational financial assessment was performed at a more detailed level for the most viable design using historic rainfall data. For the selected configuration (‘Alt 2’), the estimated potable water saving was 44% (equivalent to 131m3/year) with a rate of return on investment of 6.5% and an estimated payback period of 23years. As an initial end-user-driven design exercise, these results are promising and constitute a starting point for facilitating such approaches to urban water management at the household scale

An intelligent and low-cost eye-tracking system for motorized wheelchair control

In the 34 developed and 156 developing countries, there are ~132 million disabled people who need a wheelchair, constituting 1.86% of the world population. Moreover, there are millions of people suffering from diseases related to motor disabilities, which cause inability to produce controlled movement in any of the limbs or even head. This paper proposes a system to aid people with motor disabilities by restoring their ability to move effectively and effortlessly without having to rely on others utilizing an eye-controlled electric wheelchair. The system input is images of the user?s eye that are processed to estimate the gaze direction and the wheelchair was moved accordingly. To accomplish such a feat, four user-specific methods were developed, implemented, and tested; all of which were based on a benchmark database created by the authors. The first three techniques were automatic, employ correlation, and were variants of template matching, whereas the last one uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Different metrics to quantitatively evaluate the performance of each algorithm in terms of accuracy and latency were computed and overall comparison is presented. CNN exhibited the best performance (i.e., 99.3% classification accuracy), and thus it was the model of choice for the gaze estimator, which commands the wheelchair motion. The system was evaluated carefully on eight subjects achieving 99% accuracy in changing illumination conditions outdoor and indoor. This required modifying a motorized wheelchair to adapt it to the predictions output by the gaze estimation algorithm. The wheelchair control can bypass any decision made by the gaze estimator and immediately halt its motion with the help of an array of proximity sensors, if the measured distance goes below a well-defined safety margin. This work not only empowers any immobile wheelchair user, but also provides low-cost tools for the organization assisting wheelchair users.Scopu

Corporate Governance: Impulses from the Middle East

Corporate governance, Corporate leadership, Intercultural management, Transcultural management, G34,