Metric for Designing Inclusive User Interfaces: Action Research on the Implementation of the Care Act 2014

This action research is aimed at creating metric for inclusive user interfaces that provide are intuitive and mimic the natural conversation to bridge the skill gap between skilled users and novice users. This metric will help user interface designer to measure the ‘inclusivity’ of their design, thus producing services that as easy as an IKEA manual. This action research is conducted in Nottinghamshire County Council who invested resources to create online channel that enables customers to apply online for social care services, while recognising that their customer base is very diverse. The council adopted an inclusive design strategy to cater to all users with different needs and computer literacy levels

Bridging the age-based digital divide through inclusive design: an action research on the adoption of inclusive design in small e-government context

This research looks at using Inclusive Design as mean to bridge the age-based digital divide, by conducting Action research in a Local Council in the UK. Research on the digital divide looks at the inequality in technology access between different demographical characteristics. While this is very useful to highlight access inequality, it fails to address the steps required to bridge the gap. Some research even suggested that the digital divide is bridged and that research in this field is irrelevant. This is due to the narrow focus of some researchers about the digital divide. The focus should be not on whether older people possess Information and Communications Technology (ICT) products; it should be on how they use their products and what we can do to improve the person-technology fit. On the other hand, inclusive design has been a main driver to ensure that buildings and products do not prohibit people with disabilities from utilising the building or product. However, there is limited research about the extension of inclusive design practices in Information Systems (IS), particularly interface design and system design. Most of the current design guidelines and best practices do not provide a holistic view of the inclusive design process, thus leaving the designers on their own in terms of producing an easy interface for users, by just merely implementing the accessibility guidelines provided by the W3C to ensure inclusivity of the website or online service. Assuming that inclusivity is reached only by including screen readers and magnified modes to prospective users. The aim of the research is to provide a clear picture to discover the main challenges to Inclusive Design as well as provide a holistic and thorough inclusive design metric that allows designers to ensure that their proposed website or online service is inclusive of users from different age groups and capabilities. This design methodology can customisable according to the website or online service requirements, highlighting the important features to ensure inclusivity. Using Action research as methodology to investigate and improve design practices in a local council. The research employed a mixture of research methods to understand and intervene in the creation of an inclusive e-service during the implementation of the Care Act 2014 in the Local Council. First, semi structured interviews were conducted to provide insights of the changes that the Care Act 2014 which brought upon social care and the way that social care services are being provided in the county. Then, observations were performed during the design sessions of the online services in the Local Council to see how the design process is being carried out to ensure that the website is inclusive of all prospective users. Finally, when the website is fully developed it was tested on various users with from different age groups using the inclusivity index developed as part of the evaluation phase of the design methodology. In addition, interviews with older adults were conducted to understand the issues that make them using ICT difficult so the needs of these users were documented to help in the design process later on. The research indents to advance knowledge about inclusive design from practical and theoretical perspective. Practically, this research will help web designers and organisations looking to cater online services to as many people as possible and design methodology that fosters inclusivity. Moreover, this will help older adults to use online service by themselves, thus ensure that they can remain independent and exercise control over their needs from the government or otherwise. Theoretically, this research will help to shed the light on the digital divide and the ways to bridge this divide. By creating an inclusive design methodology that can fundamentally address the causes of the divide rather than just simply patch existing design methodologies

Grading complication following radical cystectomy and ileal conduit for bladder cancer using clavien grading system

Objective: To determine the 30-day complication rate of radical cystectomy and urinary diversion using a validated system.Study Design: An analytical descriptive study. Place and Duration of Study: The Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, from 1990 to 2010.Methodology: Patients who had undergone ileal conduit (IC) formation, following radical cystectomy (RC) for muscle invasive transitional cell carcinoma, were studied, using a prospectively maintained data base. Basic details were determined, complications were noted and graded according to the modified Clavien grading system (CG). Results were presented using descriptive statistics. Results: Of all the RC performed at this hospital 89 patients received IC. Of them 75 were male and 14 female. Mean age was 60 years. Mean duration of hospital stay was 14 days. Ten patients each received pre-operative chemotherapy and radiotherapy, respectively. Mean duration of surgery was 8.2 hours, with mean estimated blood loss of 1334 ml. Preoperative radiotherapy was associated with more complications. No other factor like ASA, co-morbidities, blood loss or duration of stay influenced the complications. Fifty patients (56.2%) did not have any complications. Most common complication of wound infection was seen in 7 patients (CG-2), followed by uretero-ileal leakage in 5, requiring percutaneous intervention under local anaesthesia (GC-3a). Mortality rate was 4.5%, classified as CG-V. Conclusion: Radical cystectomy with Ileal conduit is a major procedure with a good safety profile at this institute. Longterm follow up is still needed to evaluate delayed complications and quality of life

Greenhouses covering materials: a comparative study

Greenhouse covering material is the most governing member of the construction which controls two major parameters, the amount of light and heat diffused from the surrounding environment into the internal space. In hot areas, balancing between optimum temperature and maximum light intensity inside the greenhouse consumes most of the energy spent in vegetable production systems. In this research, a special testing stand was fabricated to simulate the structure of a typical greenhouse provided with a 400W full spectrum light as a source of light and heat. Tests were carried out to investigate the effectiveness of different commercial covering material in light and heat diffusion. Twenty one combinations of Fiberglass, Polyethylene, Polycarbonate, Plexiglass and Agril (PP nonwoven fabric) were tested. It was concluded that Plexiglass was the highest in light transmittance of 87.4%, while the lowest was 33.03% and 34.24% for Fiberglass sheets. The enthalpy of the air moving through the testing rig was calculated according to air temperature differences between inlet and outlet openings. The highest enthalpy value was recorded for one layer of Fiberglass where it was 0.81 kJ/kg air while it was 0.2 kJ/kg air for blocked Plexiglass (60mm)

In vitro Studies on Anti-diabetic and Anti-ulcer Potentials of Jatropha gossypifolia (Euphorbiaceae)

Purpose: To evaluate α-glucosidase and α-chymotrypsin enzyme inhibitory activity of Jatropha gossypifolia as a probable remedy for the management of diabetes and ulcer.Methods: Different extracts and fractions of the root, leaf and stem bark of the plant were screened for their α-glucosidase and α-chymotrypsin inhibitory activity using standard in vitro inhibition assays. Acarbose and chymostatin were used as positive control, respectively.Results: n-Butanol and ethyl acetate fraction showed maximum enzyme inhibition for α-glucosidase with 67.93 ± 0.66 and 67.67 ± 0.71 % and half maximal concentration (IC50) of 218.47 ± 0.23 and 213.45 ± 0.12 μg/ml, respectively. Dichloromethane and ethyl acetate leaf fractions exhibited maximum α-chymotrypsin inhibition activity of 85.08 ± 0.38 and 83.87 ± 0.70 %, and IC50 of 133.1 ± 0.68 and 134.5 ± 0.12 μg/ml, respectively, Acarbose exhibited enzyme inhibition activity of 92.14 ± 0.38 % with IC50 of 38.24 ± 0.1 μg/ml, while chymostatin exhibited 93.67 ± 0.38 % enzyme inhibition and IC50 of 8.24 ± 0.11 μg/ml.Conclusion: The presence of bioactive secondary metabolities with enzyme-inhibiting activity lends some support for the traditional use of this plant in the management of diabetes and ulcer. However, further investigation of the plant including identification of its active components is required.Keywords: α-Chymotrypsin, α-Glucosidase, Inhibition, Jatropha gossypifolia, Anti-diabetic, Anti-ulce

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation: outcome and its predictors among hospitalized adult patients in Pakistan.

Introduction:Our aim was to study the outcomes and predictors of in-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) among adult Patients at a tertiary care centre in Pakistan.Methods:We conducted a retrospective chart review of all adult Patients (age \u3e or =14 years), who underwent CPR following cardiac arrest, in a tertiary care hospital during a 5-year study period (June 1998 to June 2003). We excluded Patients aged 14 years or less, those who were declared dead on arrival and Patients with a do not resuscitate order. The 1- and 6-month follow-ups of discharged Patients were also recorded.Results:We found 383 cases of adult in-hospital cardiac arrest that underwent CPR. Pulseless electrical activity was the most common initial rhythm (50%), followed by asystole (30%) and ventricular tachycardia/fibrillation (19%). Return of spontaneous circulation was achieved in 72% of Patients with 42% surviving more than 24 h, and 19% survived to discharge from hospital. On follow-up, 14% and 12% were found to be alive at 1 and 6 months, respectively. Multivariable logistic regression identified three independent predictors of better outcome (survival \u3e24 h): non-intubated status [adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 3.1, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.6-6.0], location of cardiac arrest in emergency department (aOR: 18.9, 95% CI: 7.0-51.0) and shorter duration of CPR (aOR: 3.3, 95% CI: 1.9-5.5).Conclusion:Outcome of CPR following in-hospital cardiac arrest in our setting is better than described in other series. Non-intubated status before arrest, cardiac arrest in the emergency department and shorter duration of CPR were independent predictors of good outcome

Accelerated Dynamic MRI Using Kernel-Based Low Rank Constraint

We present a novel reconstruction method for dynamic MR images from highly under-sampled k-space measurements. The reconstruction problem is posed as spectrally regularized matrix recovery problem, where kernel-based low rank constraint is employed to effectively utilize the non-linear correlations between the images in the dynamic sequence. Unlike other kernel-based methods, we use a single-step regularized reconstruction approach to simultaneously learn the kernel basis functions and the weights. The objective function is optimized using variable splitting and alternating direction method of multipliers. The framework can seamlessly handle additional sparsity constraints such as spatio-temporal total variation. The algorithm performance is evaluated on a numerical phantom and in vivo data sets and it shows significant improvement over the comparison methods

Auto-MeDiSine: An Auto-Turnable Medical Decision Support Engine Using an Automated Class Outlier Detection MEthod and Auto AMLP

With advanced data analysis techniques, efforts for more accurate decision support systems for disease prediction are on the rise. According to the World Health Organization, diabetes-related illnesses and mortalities are on the rise. Hence, early diagnosis is particularly important. In this paper, we present a framework, Auto-MeDiSine, that comprises an automated version of enhanced class outlier detection using a distance-based algorithm (AutoECODB), combined with an ensemble of automatic multilayer perceptron (AutoMLP). AutoECODB is built upon ECODB by automating the tuning of parameters to optimize outlier detection process. AutoECODB cleanses the dataset by removing outliers. Preprocessed dataset is then used to train a prediction model using an ensemble of AutoMLPs. A set of experiments is performed on publicly available Pima Indian Diabetes Dataset as follows: (1) Auto-MeDiSine is compared with other state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature where Auto-MeDiSine realized an accuracy of 88.7%; (2) AutoMLP is compared with other learners including individual (focusing on neural network-based learners) and ensemble learners; and (3) AutoECODB is compared with other preprocessing methods. Furthermore, in order to validate the generality of the framework, Auto-MeDiSine is tested on another publicly available BioStat Diabetes Dataset where it outperforms the existing reported results, reaching an accuracy of 97.1%

Sleep disorders and its effect on community

The main aim of this paper is to analysis the effect of sleep disorders on the community. This study is quantitative. The questionnaire was designed and distributed among the student in school in the city of Riyadh high and intermediate school. The sample of this study consist 100 students. The researcher visited a school in the city of Riyadh high and intermediate school sections and that on December 10 to 11 to measure the impact of sleep disorders through a questionnaire that measures the effects of lack of sleep and then make them aware of the benefits of sleep and harm of lack of sleep from the physical and psychological effects, and it gave a lecture educate the students and then distribute them brochure contain the benefits and harmful effects of sleep. SPSS 21 was used to analysis that data. The results of the study indicated that lack of sleep limits a person's ability to think and solve the problem effectively, which means that people who wake up for a long time influence them to learn at an effective level. Lack of sleep affects the ability of thinking and can limit your ability to accurately interpret events, which can be difficult to respond correctly to situations in which effective decision-making is intelligent. The lack of sleep, even for one night can lead to swelling of the eyes and turn the skin into pale skin. Keywords: Sleep disorders, community