Barriers to medication adherence in patients with uncontrolled diabetes in a primary healthcare setting in Qatar: a mixed method triangulation study

Background: In Qatar, 86% of patients with diabetes are uncontrolled. Given that nonadherence to oral drug therapy and psychological insulin resistance are a common phenomenon, one could postulate that patients may not be taking their medications as prescribed. Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to explore the barriers to medication adherence among patients with uncontrolled diabetes in a primary healthcare setting from the perspectives of the patients and their healthcare providers. Methodology: This study was divided into two phases: patients’ perspective using a mixed-method approach, and healthcare providers’ perspective on the issue using qualitative approach. Patients with uncontrolled diabetes responded to a questionnaire followed by one-to-one in-depth interviews. On the other hand, healthcare providers directly involved in the care of patients with diabetes participated in semi-structured one-to-one interviews. Descriptive and inferential analyses were used for quantitative data, while thematic analysis was used for qualitative data. Finally, data from the two phases were triangulated in interpretation. Results: Overall, 74% of the sample was nonadherent to diabetes medications. The quantitative results indicated that sociodemographic characteristics did not significantly influence medication adherence, except living with family. The majority of pre-determined barriers to medication adherence were reported by nonadherent patients and the most commonly reported barrier was forgetfulness. In addition, significantly higher levels of nonadherence were found among patients who were younger than 65 years and those who were illiterate. Qualitative data revealed five different themes from both patients’ and healthcare providers’ perspectives: (1) patient-related aspects, such as patient’s characteristics, perceptions, attitude and knowledge; (2) patient-provider interaction, which involved communication and interaction time; (3) appointment system and follow up, which was highly varied among patients despite their similar needs; (4) influence of other individuals including family support and social stigma and; (5) traveling and the use of traditional medicine by the patient in home country in an effort to cure the disease. Conclusion: Despite the different perspectives related to medication nonadherence, similar themes emerged from patients and their respective healthcare providers. The identified barriers warrant concerted efforts and series of interventions which should be initiated in a step-wise approach in order to improve medication adherence and overall healthcare outcomes

Preface

In recent years the involvement of Information Technology in business, governments, and education has increased dramatically. More and more research works have been conducted in different areas of Information Technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Database Managements, Algorithms, Web Technologies, Computer Graphics, Networks, etc. In recognizing the importance and major advances, Information Technology has been chosen to be the theme of this special issue of the Information Science Journal

A deep learning system for recognizing facial expression in real-time

This article presents an image-based real-time facial expression recognition system that is able to recognize the facial expressions of several subjects on a webcam at the same time. Our proposed methodology combines a supervised transfer learning strategy and a joint supervision method with center loss, which is crucial for facial tasks. A newly proposed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, MobileNet, which has both accuracy and speed, is deployed in both offline and in a real-time framework that enables fast and accurate real-time output. Evaluations towards two publicly available datasets, JAFFE and CK+, are carried out respectively. The JAFFE dataset reaches an accuracy of 95.24%, while an accuracy of 96.92% is achieved on the 6-class CK+ dataset, which contains only the last frames of image sequences. At last, the average run-time cost for the recognition of the real-time implementation is around 3.57ms/frame on a NVIDIA Quadro K4200 GPU. - 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.This work was made possible by NPRP grant (10-0205-170346) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. Authors' addresses: Y. Miao and H. Dong, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada; emails: {ymiao036, hdong}@uottawa.ca; J. Mohamad Al Jaam, Qatar University, Ibn Khaldoon Hall, Doha, Qatar; email: [email protected]; A. El Saddik, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada; email: [email protected]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. 1551-6857/2019/05-ART33 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3311747Scopu

حول منطق التحليل الرمزي ومبدأ الاستنتاج المباشر

This paper discusses an approach using the M-valued symbolic logic with syllogistic reasoning and direct inference principle (reasoning from statistical information to conclusions about individuals), to manipu¬late statistical knowledge evaluated in a qualitative way. The graduation scale of M symbolic quantifiers is expressed in terms of truth degrees, which should not be arbitrary, but rather should be based on the available information from the knowledge base.‏هذا البحث يناقش طريقة نوعية تعتمد على المنطق الرمزي المحدود ومبادئ الاستنتاج المنطقية الثلاثية والمباشرة (الاستنتاج من المعلومات الإحصائية للحصول على الخلاصات النهائية والنتائج) لمعالجة البيانات المقيمة بطريقة نوعية ، علما بأن مقاييس التدرج المنطقية المستخدمة ممثلة بل بدرجات حقائق متنوعة تعتمد بصورة حقيقة ‏ومباشرة على المعلومات المتوفرة من قاعدة البيانات المتاحة، بدلا من أن تكون عشوائية

A new construction technique of a triangle-free 3-colored K16’s

In this paper, we propose a new coloring technique of the edges of the complete graph on 16 vertices, K16, with three different colors, without producing any monochromatic triangle. This method is totally different from those proposed by [R.E. Greenwood, A.M. Gleason, Combinatorial relations and chromatic graphs, Canadian Journal of Mathematics 7 (1955) 1–7; J.G. Kalbfleish, R.G. Stanton, On the maximal triangle-free edge-chromatic graphs in three colors, Journal of Combinatorial Theory 5 (1968) 9–20; C. Laywine, L.P. Mayberry, A simple construction giving the two non-isomorphic triangle free 3-colored K16’s, Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B (1988) 120–124; B. Benhamou, Étude des Symétries et de la Cardinalité en Calcul Propoaitionel: Application aux Algorithmes Syntaxiques, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Aix-Marseilles I, France, 1993] which prove that the classical multicolor Ramsey number R(3, 3, 3) is 17. This number is the only non-trivial tricolor Ramsey number known till now in spite of more than fifty years of extensive research on Ramsey numbers [S.P. Radziszowski, Small Ramsey numbers, The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics DS1.Revision 11 (2006) 1–60]. We show also how we can convert the Ramsey-graph 3-coloring problem into a satisfiability instance having 2160 clauses of 3-literals each and 360 variables (i.e., a 3-SAT instance)

Ramsey's Numbers by Stochastic Algorithms with New Heuristics

this paper, in the combinatorial problem of graph coloring. We improve some bounds of Ramsey's numbers and we introduce the cyclic colorings for hypergraphs. We propose, some algorithms of stochastic optimization with coloring based criterion. These algorithms are generally methods of descent, completed by an enumeration or "backtracking" when we are "close" to a solution, and methods of simulated annealing to avoid the local optima. To increase the efficiency of these algorithms, we use a strategy close to the technique called "divide and conquer". The general idea is to decompose the problem into sub problems, which are less difficult to solve (if this possible), then solving each one, independently. The obtained solutions are "pasted" together to give the solution of the initial problem. Thus, to evaluate the classical number of Ramsey R(3; 4; 5; 2) for example, we eliminate first, in the corresponding colored graph, all the 5--cliques of color 3, then all the 4--cliques of color 2 and finally all the 3--cliques of color 1. CCS'95 22 2 Description of Algorithm

حول عدد رمسي الكلاسيكي الألوان (3,3,3) R

In this paper, we are interested in the problem of evaluation of the classical multicolor Ramsey number i?(3,3,3). We first convert it successfully into a system of clauses of 3-literals each, i.e., a 3-SAT instance. We then describe the algebraic method of Greenwood and Gleason [2], which is based on the finite field Fl6, that constructs a monochromatic triangle-free edge-coloring with three colors of the Ramsey graph Kl6 associated with the number i?(3,3,3). We propose a simple and new coloring method, completely dif¬ferent from that of Greenwood and Gleason, which colors the edges of the Ramsey graph Ku with three colors without any monochromatic triangle.في هذا البحث، نحن مهتمون بمشكلة تقييم عدد رمسي الكلاسيكي متعدد الألوان (3,3,3‏)R في المرحلة الأولى، نبين كيف يمكن تحويل هذه المشكلة إلى نظام ساتي من 3 ‏متغيرات، بعد ذلك، نشرح طريقة Greenwood ‏ و Gleason ‏الجبرية، التي تعتمد على F16 المحدود، من أجل إنشاء شبكة كاملة من 16‏نقطة خالية من المثلثات آحادية اللون، بعد تلوينها بثلاثة ألوان مختلفة، حيث أن مثل هذه الشبكة الملونة تحدد قيمة عدد رمسي الكلاسيكي ‏السابق الذكر، ثم نقترح طريقة جديدة وبسيطة، مختلفة تماما عن طريقة Greenwood و Gleason لإنشاء شبكة كاملة من 16 نقطة ملونة بثلاثة الوان، وخالية من المثلثات ذات اللون الواحد

Improvement of the DSATUR algorithm for graph coloring

In this paper we discuss the deterministic Brelaz's DSATUR algorithm for graph coloring. We propose a simple modification that improves the performance of the algorithm. This modification consists of assigning the color that saturates the least number of uncolored vertices, to the selected vertex. Thus, we obtain valid k-colorings better than those obtained with DSATUR without modification. We show also that the DSATUR algorithm is optimal, for a given example, and for the bipartite graphs.Scopu

Conceptual Data Classification: Application for Knowledge Extraction

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