Leveraging health through early warning systems using mobile and service oriented technology

The provision of information on emerging dangerous circumstances in order to reduce the risks before they occur has triggered a lot of research interest in the recent past. The development of early warning systems for disaster risk management has become the focus of numerous global strategies for development. Early warning systems are surveillance systems that collect information on epidemic-prone issues such as diseases in order to trigger prompt public interventions. While the Government of Kenya is doing a lot to improve the quality of health of its citizen, by providing low cost health centers and subsidized drugs for treatment, a lot still needs to be done to prevent epidemics. Disasters wipe out decades of human progress and development in just a few seconds. The recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa is one such example. Information and communication technology (ICT) can help developing countries tackle a wide range of health problems. This research was triggered by the need to investigate how ICT can be used to leverage medical health issues development in developing countries through innovative concepts. The study was initially funded by the National Council for Science and Technology supported by United States International University to investigate how to leverage health information access through mobile technology. A pilot survey was carried out on health information requirements in different peri-urban areas and the initial results were presented in the IST-Africa 2014 conference. The presentation led to collaboration with the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, to develop an early warning system that would be tested in Kenya. This paper presents the final results of the funded project as well as the initial results of the models developed from the collaboration

Low-cost low-power data acquisition system

Data loggers are used for data acquisition and storage. This project was undertaken with the objective of constructing a low-power low-cost battery operated data acquisition system (data logger) for use in remote areas. It is a dedicated system for measuring temperatures using thermistors as temperature sensors. The system was constructed using KIM-l microcomputer as an evaluation system. It uses an 8-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter, ADC 0816 which can take up to 16 channel in-puts. By the nature of the resolution of the ADC 0816 the system can read -temperatures to an accuracy of 0.05

An architecture for flexible multimedia group management services

Multimedia systems applications have become major research interests in both computing and telecommunications industries. In some literature, multimedia is defined as "mant media" where media is derived from medium, and a medium is a means of transporting information. It is generally accepted that multimedia does enhance communication for individuals and among interacting groups of humans. Applications such as video conferencing, distance learning, and medical imaging, gain advantage in the use of multimedia applications. However, while it is recognised that future systems should provide multimedia functionality, many issues are being raised about how best to support multimedia communication. This is because multimedia requires new communications infrastructures to enable integration of various media types as well as to manipulate and control the individual media. There is also the need to support the spatial and temporal requirements of continuous media, and to support group based applications. Thus the requirements of multimedia applications are diverse; this thesis focuses on multimedia group management services. A number of architectures have been advanced on the management strategies for multimedia communications. A review of these architectures shows that they have been either application specific, or too restrictive for group based applications. This thesis presents an architecture for connection management for distributed multimedia group applications. The architecture is intended to encourage a uniform appearance to all group applications to assist in their collective management, whilst being sufficiently flexible to cope with all likely multicast mechanisms upon which such applications may be based. The concept of a media channel is introduced as the application-independent appearance of an instance of a single applications such as a video-on-demand service, or a video conferencing application. A media channel is the basic unit of management in a group user-agent and therefore is used as a basis for the management of multiple applications. The main aspects of the media channel model considered in the thesis have been substantially implemented and the performance accessed as suitable for a reasonable number of multimedia applications