The effectiveness of specific health education in providing better quality of life among asthmatic patients at primary care setting in HUSM

The global increase in asthma morbidity requires a closer examination on the aspects of asthma management. The cornerstone of asthma management is achieving adequate symptom control, better quality of life and patient education. The aim of this interventional study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific health education programme in the asthmatic patients. Thus, an interventional study was enrolled among asthmatic patients in Klinik Rawatan Keluarga, HUSM from April2004 through end of January, 2005. A hundred and thirty asthmatic patients were recruited, 60 of whom were assigned to the intervention group and another 70 to the control group. The outcomes measured were the quality of life . The Malay version of Asthma Quality of Life (AQLQ) Questionnaire was used to assess the quality of life among the asthmatics. The intervention group attended the programme as scheduled which was conducted individually in the first health education and followed by group counseling of five to tenparticipants each in the second health education. They were carried out in an interactive way. The programme included information about asthma, instruction on the appropriate use of medication and training in the metered dose inhaler (MDI) technique and information about the identification and control of asthma attacks and the recognition of early signs of exacerbation. The control group was submitted to the standard care provided at the clinic, with usual asthmatic advice regarding asthma control. As a result, the intervention group showed significant differences when compared to the control group with respect to the overall quality of life comprising of activity limitations, symptoms, emotional function and environmental stimuli. The global rating of each questionnaire also showed an increase number of those who scored 'better' in the intervention group compared to the control group. However, no significant differences observed in terms of PEFR measurements in the intervention group. It is concluded that the educational programme led to a significant improvement in the quality of life of the asthmatics and the implementation of such programme is possible at the primary care level

State-of-the-art digital watermarking attacks

Digital watermarking is a huge research area which is progressively growing. It covers theoretical studies. novel techniques, attacks and performance analysis. An embedded watermark may unintentionally or inadvel1ently be impaired by such processing. Other types of processing may be applied with the explicit goal of hindering watermark reception. In watermarking tern1inology, an "attack" is any processing that may impair detection of the watermark or communication of the information conveyed by the watermark. Broadly it can be classified as Intentional Attacks and Non-Intentional Attack

Applications of digital watermarking : current and future trends

A digital watermark is a secret key dependant signal inserted into digital data (images, sound,texts) and which can be later detected/extracted in order to make an assertion about the data. Technically, the digital watermark is represented as a kind of 'natural' noise. The identification information is encoded into the original unwatermarked data by adding more 'natural' noise and/or rearranging existing noise. The locations for embedding the watermark as well as the value of the watermark are determined by secret element

Digital watermarking : an overview

Digital watermarking has been inspired from security concerns over multimedia contents due to the advances of computer technology. Nowadays, it is easy to obtain, manipulate, distribute and store these contents due to evolution of Internet, excellent multimedia tools and low-cost storage devices. Research community and industry has shown extensive interests in developing and implementing possible solutions via digital watermarking. Digital watermarking can be defined as the process of embedding a certain piece of information (technically known as watermark) into multimedia content including text documents, images, audio or video streams, where the watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the data [1]. A generalized watermark model consists of watermark encoding and detection processes as shown in Figure 14.1 and Figure 14.2 [2]. The inputs to the embedding process are the watern1ark, the cover object and a secret key. The key is used to enforce security and to protect the watermark. The output of the watermarking scheme is the watermarked data. The channel for the watermarked data could be a lossy, noisy, unreliable channel. Thus the received data may be different from the original watermarked data. The inputs for extraction are the received watermarked data and the key corresponding to the embedding key. The output of the watermark recovery process is the recovered wa

Imperceptibility and robustness analysis of DWT-based digital image watermarking

Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on the techniques used and its intended applications. This paper concentrates on invisible digital image watermarking using discrete wavelet transform. The work flow involves watermark embedding, attacks and watermark extraction. Two methods are proposed and analyzed to imply the imperceptibility and robustness, among the most important criteria of digital watermarking, using three types of attacks – JPEG compression, blurring and histogram equalization. The results are compared through subjective visual inspections and calculative measurements using PSNR for watermark imperceptibility and SSIM Index for watermark robustness

Digital watermarking techniques and methodologies

Digital watermarking is a huge research area which is progressively growing. It covers theoretical studies. novel techniques, attacks and performance analysis. Over the years, the digital watermarking community has focused on developing new techniques for watermark embedding and detection. Analysis of these techniques leads to methods for attacks and countermeasures which are used to discover faults and limitations in applications, encouraging the development of better ones. Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on its techniques and applications. The location of watermark embedding determines two kinds of methods:- The spatial domain methods embed watermark information directly into images pixels. On the other hand, the frequency domain methods embed watelmark information in the transform domain. The general approach used in these methods is to divide the image into blocks. Each block is mapped into the transform domain using either the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) [9], the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), or the Wavelet Transform. Embedding the watermark in the frequency domain can provide more robustness than in the spatial domain. It is strong against attacks like compression where spatial domain is not. Image watermarking techniques can be distinguished according to the way the watermark is revealed from the watermarked image. One way is by comparing this image to the original one, while the other doesn't resort to this comparison. The second are usually refen'ed to as blind watermarking techniques and are preferable

Preliminary Study: The Influences of Environmental Management Practices and Customer Satisfaction towards Customer Loyalty

Green hotel is one of the efforts taken towards achieving environmental sustainability through environmental management practices applied in the hotel. However, up until November 2014, there were only 10 out of 1935 hotels registered with the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Malaysia received ASEAN Green Hotel Award. This study attempts to examine the environmental management practices in non-green hotels, and also the relationship between environmental management practices, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty among guests in a non-green hotel. Respondents were selected using a random sampling technique and data was analysed using SPSS. The findings show that all the environmental management practices have a positive relationship with customer satisfaction and customer loyalty

Wavelet digital watermarking system design and performance evaluation

Nowadays, it is easy to obtain, manipulate, distribute and store multimedia contents due to evolution of Internet, excellent multimedia tools and low-cost storage devices. Research community and industry has shown extensive interests in developing and implementing possible solutions via digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on its techniques and applications. In general, digital watermarking is distinguished according to media type (image, audio, video and etc.), visibility (visible and invisible), robustness level (fragile, semi-fragile and robust) and the need for original data (blind, semi-blind and nonblind). The scope of this research is invisible digital image watermarking for gray-scale images using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The system consists of watermark embedding, attacks and watermark extraction. A new method called subband matching was proposed and implemented. For this method, the I-level DWT coefficients of the watermark image were embedded in 2-level DWT coefficients of the cover image for the same matching subbands. System design consists of introductory details of system input, embedding and extraction processes and system output for the proposed methods. Second section is dedicated to describe evaluations of digital watermarking system

Digital watermarking : related work

Digital watermarking is a huge research area which is progressively growing. It covers theoretical studies, novel techniques, attacks and performance analysis. Over the years, the digital watermarking community has focused on developing new techniques for watermark embedding and detection. Analysis of these techniques leads to methods for attacks and countermeasures which are used to discover faults and limitations in applications, encouraging the development of better ones. Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on its techniques and applications. In general, digital watermarking is distinguished according to media type (image, audio, video and etc.), visibility (visible and invisible), robustness level (fragile, semi-fragile and robust) and the need for original data (blind, semiblind and non-blind). This chapter consists of literature review and theoretical background. A general model of digital watermarking and its terminology were described as well. Third section concentrates on related work, as this area can be considered relatively new looking at when it started and the progress made so fa

Performance evaluations of digital watermarking system

A properly designed and implemented watermarking system needs to be evaluated of its performance so that it can be compared with other systems designed for the same purpose using the same conditional/experimental parameters. Muharemagic and Furht (2003) stated that by definition, watermarking is a technique for embedding a watermark into a cover image imperceptibly and robustly. Therefore a quality of a new or improved watermarking system can be measured by evaluating these two propertie