Domain and culture-specific heuristic evaluation of the websites of universities of Pakistan

In this digital era, the website of a university is a doorway to its information and services. These websites reflect the actual university where the prospective students make plans to get admission, current students perform interaction daily, and other stakeholders also access it to get the required information. These users expect university websites to be designed professionally, in an organized manner, with a user-friendly interface, which helps them to search, navigate, and collect information effectively. Users pose cultural norms in their life unintentionally, which makes them expect the same preferences in their routine dealings. These preferences reflect a specific culture where the user resides and a specific domain where an application is being used. The heuristic evaluation methodology is widely applied for usability evaluation. It is an inspection-based, fast, and inexpensive approach for identifying usability problems in a system. These heuristics are well designed to pinpoint the general usability design faults however, they limit detecting potential domain and culture-specific usability problems. In this regard, the usability evaluation of the top ten universities of Pakistan is performed in this research using domain and culture-specific heuristic evaluation. The results of the evaluation are discussed that recognize the potential usability issues in the website design of the universities of Pakistan

Role of magnetic resonance planimetry and magnetic resonance parkinsonism index in discriminating Parkinson’s disease and progressive supranuclear palsy: A retrospective study based on 1.5 and 3 T MRI

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to assess magnetic resonance (MR) planimetric measurements and MR parkinsonism index (MRPI) in differentiating progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) from Parkinson\u27s disease (PD) using 1.5 and 3 T MRI scanner. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: After ethical approval was obtained, analysis of 34 consecutive patients with PSP, 34 patients with PD and 34 healthy controls (HCs) was performed. HCs were age-matched adults without any history of neurodegenerative disease or movement disorders. Retrospective data from the past 10 years (from January 2006 to December 2015) were obtained from the Hospital Information Management System, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. The measurements of pons area-midbrain area ratio (P/M) and MCP width-superior cerebellar peduncle (SCP) width ratio ( MCP/SCP ) were used, and MRPI was calculated by the formula ( [P/M ]× [ MCP/SCP] ). RESULTS: Midbrain area and SCP width in patients with PSP (19 males, 15 females; mean age =66.7 years) were significantly (P \u3c 0.001 ) smaller than in patients with PD (20 males, 14 females; mean age = 66.7 years ) and control participants (17 males, 17 females; mean age = 66.1 years ). P/M and MCP /SCP were significantly higher in patients with PSP than in patients with PD and control participants. All measurements showed some overlap of values between patients with PSP and patients from PD group and control participants. MRPI value was significantly higher in patients with PSP (mean 21.00) than in patients with PD (mean 9.50; P\u3c0.001) and control participants (mean 9.6; P \u3c 0.001 ), without any overlap of values among groups. No correlation was found between the duration of disease, PSP rating scale, PSP staging system and MRPI in this study. No patient with PSP received a misdiagnosis when the index was used (sensitivity and specificity, 100%). CONCLUSION: MRPI should be made an essential part of all MRI brain reporting whenever differentiation between PD and PSP is sought for

Evaluation of radiology request forms in a tertiary care hospital: An audit with a focus on the impact of technological intervention

Radiology request forms are the basis of communication between referring physicians and radiologists. These are the sole documents on the basis of which a justification to carry out a radiological procedure is carried out. However, across the globe, there is a problem of inadequately filled radiology request forms. Several interventions like standardization and the use of technology have been proposed worldwide to overcome the shortcomings of inadequately filled radiology request forms. We carried out a two-phase audit assessing the impact of a technological intervention on the quality of radiology requests with the results showing marked improvement in key parameters. A subset analysis was also done to highlight the importance of radiology request forms by following the patients\u27 treatment course. The remaining shortcomings highlight the importance of training sessions and refresher courses for junior doctors in order to familiarize them with the importance of adequately filled radiology request forms

Systematic Review and Usability Evaluation Covid-19 Mobile Applications in a Developing Nation

Mobile phone technology made tremendous progress today. In this current ongoing Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic situation worldwide, mobile phones have an essential role due to its number of applications. To save lives through proper guidelines and information, it is necessary to retain the people up to date. That's why well-needed applications are required that aim to decline the rampant increase of COVID-19 cases country-wide. Today with the increasing pandemic Covid-19, several applications have been developed to inform people about safety measures and keep them updated with the public health measures. COVID-19 applications relate to large public, hence, usability of these applications has far larger impact than any other type of applications which generally have a specific user group. Therefore, in this article, a systematic review is taken by considering their range of functions, target user groups, name, languages, size, user ratings, available interfaces, response time, release date, up-dating date and up to date cases. There exist several methods for evaluating usability. In this work, we use user-based usability evaluation methods to explore usability issues in COVID-19 apps. By performing analysis on the extracted data, we examine some facts like the impact of gender on usability, impact of age, usability dimensions, and the effect of app functions on usability to see whether they affect usability positively or negativel

Internet of Things (IoT) Based Water Irrigation System

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economy of Pakistan. Issues concerning irrigation have been always encumbering the development of the country. Water scarcity is becoming a big issue because of climate change, insufficient services and rising population. Farmers are not receiving the supply of equitable water efficiently due to current methods of irrigation, such as inequitable water distribution, manual reporting of mogha discharge by OFWM, change of water turn at late night and no need of water at his allocated time, tail-end user problems like either too much of water supply or no availability of water as per need of farmers. One solution to this problem is a smart irrigation system in which the system uses internet of things (IoT) based sensors to monitor water levels and communicates the water situation to the user. In this research, we elaborate on the applicability of the Internet of Things (IOT) in the irrigation system and propose an architecture of IoT based water irrigation system using a wireless sensor network to solve the problems of farmers. The IoT based smart irrigation system is based on the raspberry pi to improve the productivity of water and keep costs down. Farmer is informed about fields while there is any deviance from the expected water situation by a text message

Internet of Things (IoT) Based Water Irrigation System

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economy of Pakistan. Issues concerning irrigation have been always encumbering the development of the country. Water scarcity is becoming a big issue because of climate change, insufficient services and rising population. Farmers are not receiving the supply of equitable water efficiently due to current methods of irrigation, such as inequitable water distribution, manual reporting of mogha discharge by OFWM, change of water turn at late night and no need of water at his allocated time, tail-end user problems like either too much of water supply or no availability of water as per need of farmers. One solution to this problem is a smart irrigation system in which the system uses internet of things (IoT) based sensors to monitor water levels and communicates the water situation to the user. In this research, we elaborate on the applicability of the Internet of Things (IOT) in the irrigation system and propose an architecture of IoT based water irrigation system using a wireless sensor network to solve the problems of farmers. The IoT based smart irrigation system is based on the raspberry pi to improve the productivity of water and keep costs down. Farmer is informed about fields while there is any deviance from the expected water situation by a text message