RE-ENGINEERING THE NDDC’S MASTER PLAN: AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH

This paper examined the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC)’s master plan, which promised different programmes such as: employment generation, education, and health, among others. The authors reviewed competing analysis of the extant development policies and conclude that the NDDC’s master plan is not radically different from the extant policies and may aggravate the antimonies to development in the region. If lasting solution to the lingering crisis in the Niger Delta is desired, it is essential to positively utilize combined powers of local organizations. Ultimately, rather than romancing with military and political approaches that have not engendered sustainable development, the people who live with and whose lives are directly affected by the Niger Delta crisis should be reckoned with in arresting the crisis and positively transforming the region

An Experimental Comparison of Speech and DTMF for VoiceXML-Based Expert Systems

Comparisons of DTMF and speech modalities for interacting with diverse dialogue systems for different tasks, among different user populations have led to different design recommendations for different user populations. This paper reports the results of the experimental comparison of these input modalities in a new context of VoiceXML-based diseases diagnosis expert system among a new user population - Nigerians. The results show that DTMF was more satisfying than speech for system satisfaction. Modality wise, speech was more satisfying than DTMF. Speech was also more natural than DTMF. DTMF was preferred by the majority and was more effective and efficient than speech. For diseases diagnosis expert health dialogue systems in Nigeria, DTMF is recommended for effectiveness and efficiency. It is also recommended for satisfaction. Speech is recommended for modality satisfaction while both modalities are recommended for entertainment purpose. Speech is advocated for modality naturalness. However, a platform that incorporates the two modalities will provide the benefits of the two, and allow the users varieties of choices that best suit their need

Solid Waste Management in a Leprosarium in Southwestern Nigeria

Waste from healthcare institutions generally ought to be treated and disposed hygienically. However, the type of institution normally determines the material component and the nature of the waste generated whether it is hazardous or non-hazardous, infectious or non-infectious waste. Also health status of an individual or community is a function of standard of living, medical services available, social amenities and hygienic environment normally determined through impact assessment. These have been examined in relation to the leprosarium in Ogbomosho, Southwestern Nigeria. The leprosarium under study consists of a clinic and three camps located at about 1000m from the clinic. The leprosarium housed 30 patients, while the camps served as home for about 140 people under rehabilitation together including their children. As one of the health institutions, it is apparent that the waste generated is heterogeneous mixture of both general municipal waste and bio-medical waste. The percentage of biomedical waste which is hazardous in nature is low about 1.0% with average generation rate of 0.13kg/day while that of non-hazardous, non-infectious general waste is 0.288kg/person/day. The average waste generation rate in term of mass is determined to be between 0.084 – 0.095kg/person/day which reveals the poor status and rural nature of these leper settlements. The waste components consist of bandages and swabs, paper, nylon and plastic, domestic waste, animal waste (mostly goat manure), wood ash and yard trimmings which are being disposed on open dump sites and sometimes by open burning which are unhygienic causing health hazards. Accumulation of these waste components without proper disposal initiates its putrefaction which produces offensive odour. In addition, absence of adequate sanitary facilities has promoted open defecation which is a source of infectious, diseases. As an economical, appropriate and useful method of waste disposal, composting was proposed since it is found relevant and acceptable  for the leprosarium and the settlements around as the waste generated is predominantly biodegradable and decomposable materials. Key words: Solid waste, bio-medical waste, characterization, waste disposal, compostin

A framework for intelligent speech-based self-care health information and disease diagnosis systems.

Self-care health information obtained from the Internet is largely delivered in text form, and therefore inadequate for the needs of the blind, the visually impaired and the computer illiterates. Existing speech-based disease screening systems also lack reasoning capability expected of disease diagnosis systems. In this work, we have designed and developed SSDDeS that makes possible, speech-based access to self-care health information. The system also diagnoses diseases using rule-based reasoning technique. Selected number of fever rampant in Africa is diagnosed by the system. Health information for the types of fever diagnosed by the system and information about how these diseases are diagnosed was obtained from the American Medical Library Association recommended websites and doctors. VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse was used to develop, test and deploy the prototype application. Voxeo Prophecy was used as the media platform, and server-side Javascript was used to specify the rules using script objects. Logic objects were used to control the logic of the dialog flow. VoiceObjects embedded database was used to store the context of the problem domain, while the inbuilt rule engine within VoiceObjects determines which rule gets fired. X-Lite soft phone was used to call the application. This initiative makes web-based health information available through speech and takes care of the needs of the estimated 180,000,000 visually impaired and blind people worldwide as well as the computer illiterates that cannot access websites. It also incorporates reasoning, which existing systems lack, into speech-based disease screening systems to enable them diagnose more than one disease

A Model of Knowledge-Based Health Dialogue System With VoiceXML

VoiceXML enables the building of dialogue systems that users can interact with through the use of dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) key input and speech. The VoiceXML standard features output of synthesized speech, output of audio files, recognition of spoken input, recognition of dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) key input, recording of spoken input, but none of natural language understanding (NLU), natural language generation (NLG) and natural language knowledge representation. The standard does not also support building expert or knowledge-based systems. Although previous work have successfully integrated intelligent components into VoiceXML-based systems to make them intelligent to handle NLU and NLG, this paper investigated the viability of integrating intelligent component technologies suitable for knowledge-based systems into VoiceXML-based systems. In achieving the objective of the work, the paper proposes integration of Java expert system shell into health dialogue system to enable the building of expert system for diagnosis of diseases. The results showed that it is possible to build knowledge-based systems with VoiceXML

Energy Audit of Asejire Community for a Small Hydropower Scheme

Energy is an important infrastructure for national development. In Nigeria the erratic power supply experienced, and especially in rural areas is an important concern. Energy audit is the assessment of the energy need and efficiency of a building. Hence, energy audit of Asejire community was conducted for developing a small hydropower scheme (SHP) for power generation. The household appliances used were determined, the appliances consuming the most energy in a rural setting were identified, buildings with high energy consumption were identified; and their energy need was evaluated. 1817 kW h was the daily energy consumption of the Asejire community with houses being the most energy consuming buildings by the community, while Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC) an industry in Asejire town had an average daily energy consumption of 29700 kW h. This gave a daily total energy consumption of 31517 kW h with a rated power of 1.389 MW. The energy need of the Asejire Community can be solved with the incorporation of a Small Hydropower Scheme (SHP) by utilizing the Asejire dam and thereby matching their energy demand with the energy supply from the Small Hydropower Scheme (SHP)

Influence of Facilities on Patronage of the Various Shopping Malls in Ibadan, Nigeria

The way shopping malls have sprawled every nook and cranny particularly in the developing economy is evident from major cities to even sub-urban areas. The expansion evident in the various locations of these shopping malls can be attributed to its patronage. Earlier researchers have linked the patronage of these malls to influences resulting from location, gender, image, type of shoppers amongst other. Even though studies on facilities and how it influences patronage are evident particularly in the developed economies such work also studied other factors thereby not giving a detailed finding on the linkage between facilities provided in such malls and the level of patronage from shoppers. This present study thereby focuses on influence of facilities provided on patronage of the five (5) identified shopping malls in Ibadan, Oyo State Nigeria. The study being a cross-sectional research survey entailed the distribution of questionnaires to 143, 126, 127, 145 and 126 shoppers of Cocoa Mall; Heritage Mall; Jericho Mall; Palms Mall and Ventura Mall, respectively all located in the study area, Ibadan. A cumulative response rate of 80.3% was attained. Data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics of weighted mean and substantiated with factor analysis. It was revealed that most identified facilities in the malls have a great influence on patronage of the malls. However, in order to avoid superfluity of investment, investors could commence provision of Eatery/ Food court (Co-V1, 0.72) as recreation facility; Kids play center (Co-V1, 0.79) as children’s facility; Toilet/Restroom (Co-V1, 0.84) as service facility; POS (Co-V1, 0.91) as banking facility and free medical checkup (Co- V1, 0.91) as health facility as these have most remarkable influence on patronage of the malls. The researchers hereby advocated that investors can be guided in the provision of the relevant facilities to prevent superfluity while the keen sustenance of these specific facilities can sustain patronage of the various malls in the study area

Perceptions of Nigerian medical students regarding their preparedness for precision medicine: a cross-sectional survey in Lagos, Nigeria

Background Advances in precision medicine in Nigeria suggest improving genomics education and competency among healthcare practitioners to facilitate clinical translation. Due to the scarcity of research in this area, this study aimed to assess Nigerian medical students’ perceptions about their preparedness to integrate precision medicine into their future clinical practice. Methods This was an institution-based cross-sectional study of medicine and surgery students in their clinical years attending the two fully accredited colleges of medicine in Lagos, Nigeria, between April and October 2022 using an adapted tool administered via Google Forms. The survey assessed their awareness, perceptions about knowledge, ability, and attitudes toward precision medicine, ethical concerns, and perceptions about their education in precision medicine. Multivariate linear regression models were used to assess factors associated with students’ perceptions of their knowledge, ability, and attitudes. Results A total of 300 students completed the questionnaires with a response rate of 40%. Awareness of genomic medicine terminology was high (92.0%). Responses to knowledge and ability questions revealed notable gaps, however, respondents had positive attitude scores overall. Higher medical school year was independently associated with lower knowledge (ptrend = 0.003) and ability (ptrend = 0.005) scores, and knowledge score was independently associated with a higher ability score (β: 0.76 95%CI: 0.67, 0.84; p Conclusion Despite high awareness of precision medicine terminology and overall positive attitudes, our findings highlight gaps in knowledge and ability to integrate genomics into the care of patients and a need to improve precision medicine education among Nigerian medical students

Isothermal Recombinase Polymerase amplification (RPA) of Schistosoma haematobium DNA and oligochromatographic lateral flow detection

© 2015 Rosser et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article

Trends in mortality by labour market position around retirement ages in three European countries with different welfare regimes

<p>Objectives: In the face of economic downturn and increasing life expectancy, many industrial nations are adopting a policy of postponing the retirement age. However, questions still remain around the consequence of working longer into old age. We examine mortality by work status around retirement ages in countries with different welfare regimes; Finland (social democratic), Turin (Italy; conservative), and England and Wales (liberal).</p> <p>Methods: Death rates and rate ratios (RRs) (reference rates = ‘in-work’), 1970 s–2000 s, were estimated for those aged 45–64 years using the England and Wales longitudinal study, Turin longitudinal study, and the Finnish linked register study.</p> <p>Results: Mortality of the not-in-work was consistently higher than the in-work. Death rates for the not-in-work were lowest in Turin and highest in Finland. Rate ratios were smallest in Turin (RR men 1972–76 1.73; 2002–06 1.63; women 1.22; 1.68) and largest in Finland (RR men 1991–95 3.03; 2001–05 3.80; women 3.62; 4.11). Unlike RRs for men, RRs for women increased in every country (greatest in Finland).</p> <p>Conclusions: These findings signal that overall, employment in later life is associated with lower mortality, regardless of welfare regime.</p&gt