Coloquio: Pro-Social Games for Healthy Social Interaction

This study was conducted to address the unhealthy social and emotional development of children today as they are exposed to the adverse effects technology dominant environment. The extent of interference of screen interaction in today’s group activities at home, hinders opportunities for families to interact with one another. Surveys and tests were conducted for the purpose of finding where the undesired behaviors and habits formed by screen interaction become very pervasive. And the design solution proposes a pro-social activity that makes use of cognitive abilities to allow social activities and conversations to happen in parallel

Onchocerciasis in Gilgel Ghibe River valley Southwest Ethiopia

Objective: To determine the prevalence of onchocerciasis and the entomological transmission indices such as the parous rate and annual transmission potential (ATP).Setting: Gilgel Ghibe village, Gilgel Ghibe River Valley Southwest Ethiopia between April 1994 and March 1995.Subjects: Two hundred twenty eight subjects of the total 400 population in Gilgel Ghibe village were subjected to parasitological and clinical examinations.Method: Two skin snips per person were taken and examined for microfilariae of Onchocerca volvulus. Fly collections were done from dawn to dusk from human baits seated in pairs at four representative sites at the river bank and away from the river bank. Flies were dissected for parity and infections with O. volvulus larvae.Results: Among the 228 people examined, the prevalence of the disease was low (17%), being higher in males (19%) than in females (14%). The geometric mean of microfilarial density was 11.1 (range, 1-132) mf per skin snip. Itching followed by pigmentary changes were the most common clinical signs and symptoms. The predominant anthropophilic blackfly species was Simulium (Edwardsellum) damnosum s.l. The annual parous rate and ATP were 74.7% and 1669.5, respectively, being higher at the river bank than at sites further away suggesting a greater risk of infection by the river side.Conclusion: The low prevalence of onchocerciasis in Gilgel Ghibe area vis-a-vis the high ATP level could be due to the possible presence of bovine onchocerciasis in the area. Further studies employing molecular techniques are thus required to identify O. volvulus from other filariae in flies

Prevalence of intestinal parasitic infections among urban dwellers in southwest Ethiopia

No Abstract. The Ethiopian Journal of Health Development Vol. 21 (1) 2007: pp. 12-1

Seroprevalence of contagious caprine pleuropneumonia in Borana and Guji lowlands, Southern Ethiopia

A multistage cross sectional serological study and questionnaire survey were conducted on contagious caprine pleuropneumonia in selected districts of Borana and Guji lowlands, Southern Ethiopia, to determine the prevalence of the disease and identify risk factors associated with the occurrence of the disease. A total of 900 sera samples were collected and tested using Complement Fixation Test (CFT). Questionnaire surveys were conducted with 69 randomly selected households. Out of the 900 goat sera samples tested, 119 (13.2%) were seropositive for CCPP, giving an overall seroprevalence of 13.2 % (95% CI=11.0%-15.4%) in the study areas. A seroprevalence of 18.3% (95% CI=14.3%-22.7%), 11.7% (95% CI=8%-15.2%) and 9.7% (95% CI=6.3%-12.6%) were recorded in Liban, Teltale and Moyale districts respectively. The seroprevalence recorded in Liban district was significantly different from that of Moyale district (

Unsupervised feature learning for visual sign language identification

Prior research on language identification focused primarily on text and speech. In this paper, we focus on the visual modality and present a method for identifying sign languages solely from short video samples. The method is trained on unlabelled video data (unsupervised feature learning) and using these features, it is trained to discriminate between six sign languages (supervised learning). We ran experiments on video samples involving 30 signers (running for a total of 6 hours). Using leave-one-signer-out cross-validation, our evaluation on short video samples shows an average best accuracy of 84%. Given that sign languages are under-resourced, unsupervised feature learning techniques are the right tools and our results indicate that this is realistic for sign language identification

Speaker diarization using gesture and speech

We demonstrate how the problem of speaker diarization can be solved using both gesture and speaker parametric models. The novelty of our solution is that we approach the speaker diarization problem as a speaker recognition problem after learning speaker models from speech samples corresponding to gestures (the occurrence of gestures indicates the presence of speech and the location of gestures indicates the identity of the speaker). This new approach offers many advantages: comparable state-of-the-art performance, faster computation and more adaptability. In our implementation, parametric models are used to model speakers' voice and their gestures: more specifically, Gaussian mixture models are used to model the voice characteristics of each person and all persons, and gamma distributions are used to model gestural activity based on features extracted from Motion History Images. Tests on 4.24 hours of the AMI meeting data show that our solution makes DER score improvements of 19% on speech-only segments and 4% on all segments including silence (the comparison is with the AMI system)

Modeling Public Transport Users’ Trip Production in Hawassa City, Ethiopia

Today, overcrowded public transport demand, resulting in huge costs in an urban area. Similarly, there are a lot of people who use public transport in Hawassa city. This study aimed to develop public transport users' trip production models at the household level. Some socio-economic characteristics and trip detail of the public transport users were collected randomly from the different households through a questionnaire survey. The data gathered was fed into IBM SPSS package version 20 to develop linear regression models. The developed models are associated with trips for purpose and time intervals of trips made. The developed linear regression models, general trips, work trips, educational trips, and trips made before 8:00 AM and after 4:00 PM had good explanatory power. The value of explanatory power comprised of 0.656, 0.722, 0.549, 0.610 and 0.510. These values indicated the explanation power of the socio-economic characteristics on the trips made. It means the daily trips production was significantly affected by the number of working individuals, the different age brackets, cars and motorcycles, and the monthly income per household. The most frequent public transport users’ trips production regarding the trip purpose and time are work trips and occurred after 4:00 PM. This scenario represented a good model developed in this study. Hence, it is suggested that Hawassa city’s traffic management office use the developed models to predict the future trips demand to provide a proper scheme to avoid congestion during the peak hour of the day

Incidence and predictors of loss to follow-up among HIV-positive adults in northwest Ethiopia: a retrospective cohort study.

BackgroundDespite the rapid expansion of antiretroviral therapy services, 'loss to follow-up' is a significant public health concern globally. Loss to follow-up of individuals from ART has a countless negative impact on the treatment outcomes. There is, however, limited information about the incidence and predictors of loss to follow-up in our study area. Thus, this study aimed to determine the incidence rate and predictors of loss to follow-up among adult HIV patients on ART.MethodsA retrospective cohort study was undertaken using 484 HIV patients between January 30, 2008, and January 26, 2018, at Debre Markos Referral Hospital. All eligible HIV patients who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were included in this study. Data were entered into Epi-data Version 4.2 and analyzed using STATATM Version 14.0 software. The Nelson-Aalen cumulative hazard estimator was used to estimate the hazard rate of loss to follow-up, and the log-rank test was used to compare the survival curve between different categorical variables. Both bivariable and multivariable Cox-proportional hazard regression models were fitted to identify predictors of LTFU.ResultsAmong a cohort of 484 HIV patients at Debre Markos Referral Hospital, 84 (17.36%) were loss their ART follow-up. The overall incidence rate of loss to follow-up was 3.7 (95% CI 3.0, 5.0) per 100 adult-years. The total LTFU free time of the participants was 2294.8 person-years. In multivariable Cox-regression analysis, WHO stage IV (AHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.2, 6.2), having no cell phone (AHR 1.9; 95% CI 1.1, 3.4), and rural residence (AHR 0.6; 95% CI 0.37, 0.99) were significant predictors of loss to follow-up.ConclusionThe incidence of loss to ART follow-up in this study was low. Having no cell phone and WHO clinical stage IV were causative predictors, and rural residence was the only protective factor of loss to follow-up. Therefore, available intervention modalities should be strengthened to mitigate loss to follow-up by addressing the identified risk factors

Absorbable versus silk sutures for surgical treatment of trachomatous trichiasis in Ethiopia: a randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Trachoma causes blindness through an anatomical abnormality called trichiasis (lashes touching the eye). Trichiasis can recur after corrective surgery. We tested the hypothesis that using absorbable sutures instead of silk sutures might reduce the risk of recurrent disease among patients with major trichiasis in a randomised trial. METHODS AND FINDINGS: 1,300 individuals with major trichiasis from rural villages in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia were recruited and assigned (1:1) by computer-generated randomisation sequence to receive trichiasis surgery using either an absorbable suture (polyglactin-910) or silk sutures (removed at 7-10 days) in an otherwise identical surgical technique. Participants were examined every 6 months for 2 years by clinicians masked to allocation. The primary outcome measure was recurrent trichiasis (≥one lash touching the eye) at 1 year. There was no difference in prevalence of recurrent trichiasis at 1 year (114 [18.2%] in the absorbable suture group versus 120 [19.7%] in the silk suture group; odds ratio = 0.90, 95% CI 0.68-1.20). The two groups also did not differ in terms of corneal opacification, visual acuity, conjunctival inflammation, and surgical complications. CONCLUSIONS: There was no evidence that use of absorbable polyglactin-910 sutures was associated with a lower prevalence of trichiasis recurrence at 1 year postsurgery than silk sutures. However, from a programmatic perspective, polyglactin-910 offers the major advantage that patients do not have to be seen soon after surgery for suture removal. The postoperative review after surgery using absorbable polyglactin-910 sutures can be delayed for 3-6 months, which might allow us to better determine whether a patient needs additional surgery. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00522860