Formal modelling and design of mobile prescription applications

Adverse drug effects are a major cause of death in the world with tens of thousand deaths occurring each year because of medication or prescription errors. Many errors involve the prescription or administration of the wrong drug or dosage by care givers to patients due to illegible handwriting, dosage mistakes, confusing drug names. With the use of mobile devices such as personal digital assistants and smart phones some of these errors could be eliminated because they allow prescription information to be captured and viewed in type rather than handwriting. This paper presents a formal modelling, and design of a prescription application to improve health care services. This could lead to costs and life savings in healthcare centres across the world especially in developing countries where treatment processes are usually paper based

Towards A Well-Secured Electronic Health Record in the Health Cloud

The major concerns for most cloud implementers particularly in the health care industry have remained data security and privacy. A prominent and major threat that constitutes a hurdle for practitioners within the health industry from exploiting and benefiting from the gains of cloud computing is the fear of theft of patients health data in the cloud. Investigations and surveys have revealed that most practitioners in the health care industry are concerned about the risk of health data mix-up amongst the various cloud providers, hacking to comprise the cloud platform and theft of vital patients’ health data.An overview of the diverse issues relating to health data privacy and overall security in the cloud are presented in this technical report. Based on identifed secure access requirements, an encryption-based eHR security model for securing and enforcing authorised access to electronic health data (records), eHR is also presented. It highlights three core functionalities for managing issues relating to health data privacy and security of eHR in health care cloud

A Voice-based Mobile Prescription Application for Healthcare Services (VBMOPA)

Adverse drug effects are a major cause of death in the world with tens of thousand deaths occurring across the world each year because of medication or prescription errors. Many of such errors involve the administration of the wrong drug or dosage by care givers to patients due to indecipherable handwritings, drug interactions, confusing drug names etc. The adoption of voice-based mobile applications could eliminate some of these errors because they allow prescription information to be captured and heard through voice response rather than in the physician’s handwriting. This paper presents a design and implementation of a Voice-based Mobile Prescription Application (vbmopa) to improve health care services. The application can be accessed through a mobile phone by dialing an appropriate number. This system could lead to costs and life savings in healthcare centres across the world especially in developing countries where treatment processes are usually cumbersome and paper based

Institutional Repositories: Features, Architecture, Design and Implementation Technologies

Europe is the leading continent in terms of active adoption and use of Digital Libraries – particularly Institutional Repositories (IRs). Africa has not done poorly in this area with a steady increase from 19 repositories in 2008 to 46 in January, 2011 but there is need to raise awareness and channel efforts towards making IRs easily accessible to Africans through ubiquitous channels such as hand-helds and mobile devices. This paper reviews the features, architecture, design and implementation technologies of IRs. In addition, it highlights viable research areas that can be pursued by African researchers in the field of Digital Libraries. It also encourages research efforts to focus on areas that will be beneficial to Africa

A Review of Models for Evaluating Quality in Open Source Software

Open source products/projects targeting the same or similar applications are common nowadays. This makes choosing a tricky task. Quality is one factor that can be considered when choosing among similar open source solutions. In order to measure quality in software, quality models can be used. Open source quality models emerged due to the inability of traditional quality models to measure unique features (such as community) of open source software. The aim of the paper therefore is to examine the characteristic features, unique strengths, and limitations of existing open source quality models. In addition, we compare the models based on some selected attributes

A Framework for the Design of a Mobile-Based Alert System for Outpatient Adherence in Nigeria

Nigeria ranks among the countries with the highest child and maternal mortality rate. Chronic diseases are the most common contributors to the diseases burden in Nigeria most especially Malaria, Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS. Adherence to long-term therapy in out-patient condition is required to reduce and curb the prevalence of these diseases. Poor adherence to long-term therapies severely compromises the effectiveness of treatment; making this a critical issue in population health both from the perspective of quality of life and of health economics. This work introduces a m-technology based system that will provide an easy way of complying with drug regimen. It will make use of the Short Messaging Service (SMS) of mobile phones to provide reminders at dosing times. It will design architecture for mobile health interventions and develop a prototype SMS-based system to improve out-patient adherence. This system will be deployed over a period of time at selected hospitals and chronic disease management centers in selected states in Nigeria, and the adherence rates measured via health outcomes and evaluated. This would provide a significant positive return on investment through primary prevention (of risk factors) and secondary prevention of adverse health outcomes. It will also inform predictions of future population health outcomes predicted by treatment efficacy data. Keywords: out-patient, m-technology, adherence, chronic diseases, Nigeria, SM

THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS OF PARENTS ONCHILDREN'S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIA

The relationship between the Socioeconomic Status (SES) of students and their academic 'achievement was examined in this study. The research was carried out on a randomly selected sample of 623 Junior Secondary School students from four secondary schools in Ado-Odo, Ota, Ogun State. The parental educational and occupational background was used as a measure of family social status. Student achievement is a score of the standardized Junior Secondary School Examination in English language organized by National Examination Council [NECO]. Parental Social Economic Status in particular has a significant and substantive independent effect on individual academic achievement

A Voice-Enabled Framework for Recommender and Adaptation Systems in E-Learning

With the proliferation of learning resources on the Web, finding suitable content (using telephone) has become a rigorous task for voice-based online learners to achieve better performance. The problem with Finding Content Suitability (FCS) with voice E-Learning applications is more complex when the sight-impaired learner is involved. Existing voice-enabled applications in the domain of E-Learning lack the attributes of adaptive and reusable learning objects to be able to address the FCS problem. This study provides a Voice-enabled Framework for Recommender and Adaptation (VeFRA) Systems in E-learning and an implementation of a system based on the framework with dual user interfaces – voice and Web. A usability study was carried out in a visually impaired and non-visually impaired school using the International Standard Organization’s (ISO) 9241-11 specification to determine the level of effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction. The result of the usability evaluation reveals that the prototype application developed for the school has “Good Usability” rating of 4.13 out of 5 scale. This shows that the application will not only complement existing mobile and Web-based learning systems, but will be of immense benefit to users, based on the system’s capacity for taking autonomous decisions that are capable of adapting to the needs of both visually impaired and non-visually impaired learners

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION: AN IMPERATIVE FOR SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION IN AN INFORMATION AGE

This paper discusses the important nature of communication in modern practice for school administrators. It looks at examples of the different types of technological means to facilitate effective communication. Two hypotheses were developed to examine the relationship between successful administration and effective communication. This study adopted the descriptive research of the ex-post facto type and multi-stage sampling technique was used to select participants for this study. In all 325 participants were selected made up of 125 staff and 300 students. One survey instrument was used in this study - Communication Effectiveness Rating Scale (CRES) developed by these researchers. The findings of this study indicate that students do not value importance of communication in school and students perceived more problems militating against effective communication in school than staff