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Working together to support family caregivers of older Nigerian adults with chronic illness at home
Get PDFIn Nigeria, the burden of caring for older adults with chronic illness at home significantly impacts family members who are the primary caregivers. This calls for support from relevant stakeholders that can help improve caregiver outcomes. Despite having an informal social support network comprising family, friends, and religious and community groups, it is not enough to relieve the burdens of care. Studies suggest collaborative efforts between relevant stakeholders to support family caregivers. This study, therefore, aims to explore the perception of policy implementers, health care professionals, community, and religious leaders on support for family caregivers of cohabiting older adults with chronic illness in Benue, Middle-belt Nigeria. A convenient purposive sampling technique guided the recruitment process, and in-depth semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from fourteen respondents in this qualitative study. Findings revealed that family caregivers needed three types of support: (1) create public awareness to recognise the family caregivers’ role; (2) identification of family caregivers’; (3) enhance access to training services that will help improve home care support. As a result: (1) the health and well-being of family caregivers will be promoted; (2) a database of family caregivers’ will be generated; (3) an organised system will be in place for stakeholders to assist. Therefore, relevant stakeholders such as community leaders, religious leaders, Health care professionals, and non-governmental organisations, with the government taking the lead, should work towards creating a programme, committee, or department that addresses family caregivers’ immediate needs. This requires each stakeholder to play a vital role, focusing on an essential holistic change to support family caregivers
Modeling energy consumption in IoT systems using stochastic reward nets
Get PDFToday, internet of things (IoT) is widely used in various fields, such as health control, smart city, smart
buildings, and so on. One of the severe concerns in IoT-based systems is the issue of energy consumption and its
management. The IoT-based systems have limited resources. It is also difficult to access them in many situations;
so, their energy sources must be appropriately consumed and managed. In order to design and build IoT systems,
many factors, such as the usable chips, the type of communication protocols, the timing of data transfer, and so
on, directly affect the system's energy consumption. Therefore, in the design phase of these systems, it is
necessary to model and evaluate their energy consumption and their compliance with the requirements. In this
paper, a stochastic reward nets (SRN) model is introduced for modeling and quantitative evaluation of energy
consumption in IoT-based systems. In this method, first the modeling of the energy source and the influencing
factors are explained, then the entire system is modeled using these basic models, Then, by changing the
configuration of the system, the influencing factors on energy consumption are studied and measured, and the
most suitable configuration is selected using the results. This method can lead to a significant reduction in the
costs of a system before its operation. Using this model, a case study has been investigated and the effects of
various factors, such as the number of nodes connected to the cluster head, the existence of sleep/wake mode,
and different transmission rates on system performance and energy consumption are investigated. In this paper
the effect of the system configuration on the amount of energy consumption has been evaluated and it has been
shown that the packet delay increases with the increase in the number of nodes connected to the cluster head, and
in order to reduce the number of packets in the buffer by 75% and reduce the end-to-end delay of the packets, a
transmitter with a transmission rate of 0.037 should be used
Utilizing Internet of Things for Automating Food Security and Savvy Agriculture: A Review
No full textFood security, a concept rooted in the 1970s, emphasizes ensuring the global availability and affordability of essential food items. Agriculture, land, and water stand as vital resources for human survival. However, their contamination resulting from urbanization, cultivation, and chemical usage hinders optimal production quality. In this context, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been increasingly prevalent across sectors, with agriculture benefiting from improved productivity and reduced planting costs. This comprehensive study delves into the significance of IoT in agribusiness, surveying its fundamental components and addressing prevailing challenges. Specifically, it comprehensively covers the IoT ecosystem in agriculture, encompassing the employment of drones/UAVs, pertinent protocols, and networking challenges. Through this extensive review, we aim to shed light on the manifold opportunities and complexities associated with leveraging IoT for automated food security and savvy agriculture
Efficiency of bacteria-based self-healing mechanism in concrete
No full textConcrete is most widely used as an essential building material in the construction industry all over the globe. Concrete deteriorates over time, and cracks eventually form on its surface for many reasons, such as environmental surroundings and extra. This deterioration and cracks might lead to the ingress of water and chemicals that susceptible steel bars or reinforcements to corrosion. Since this deterioration is inevitable, maintenance and repair are also necessary. This process requires skilled labor and is cost-effective. Thus, researchers suggested alternative techniques to enhance concrete's mechanical properties and search for treatments to be applied to concrete's surface for healing and sealing the cracks by producing calcium carbonate precipitation. Therefore, self-healing concrete was introduced; this method is significant as it's proven environmentally friendly. This research aims to investigate the use of liquid bacteria incorporated in concrete mix and assess whether there would be improvements in the mechanical properties of the bacterial concrete compared to the conventional mix and an autogenous self-healing mix. Two different concentrations of an alkaliphile bacterium called Bacillus Subtilis were incorporated into the concrete mixes to test their ability to repair cracks by producing calcium carbonate and sealing them. This experiment showed a remarkable increase in bacterial concrete's compressive and tensile strengths. A visible partial crack sealing was also observed in specimens containing different concentrations of Bacillus Subtilis. Results also indicate that optimum results were obtained when the bacterial solution of concentration 10 8 cells/ml was incorporated, especially at early ages
A progressive sense of place and the open city: Micro-spatialities and micro-conflicts on a north London council estate
Get PDFDoreen Massey’s progressive sense of place (2005) and Richard Sennett’s ethical case for the open city (2018) rely on seeing space as open. It is openness that guarantees an open future, an openness to others, and the possibility of a progressive politics. Curiously, the Garden City, for both, becomes a test case for a progressive sense of the open city. For Massey, her lived experience of growing up in Wythenshawe reveals both the pos- sibility of, and also the undermining of, the possibility of creating a progressive sense of place. In contrast, Sennett sees the Garden City, for all its progressive elements, as ultimately blocking new ways of dwelling in the city. The Garden City, for him, is too closed to provide a progressive sense of place. In north London, we discover a hidden Garden City, with secret gardens. Its micro-spatialities – and its micro-conflicts – enable us to rethink both these accounts of a progressive sense of place and of the open city. Rather than seeing openness in a physical infrastructure of space and place, we wish to emphasize the openness and closedness that emerges from the ways the people encounter, manage and dispute the microspatialities of everyday life on the estate
Discovering and Mapping Colloquial Terminologies Describing Underutilized and Neglected Food Crops—A Comprehensive Review
No full textGlobal levels of biodiversity and dietary diversity are decreasing, leading to food and nutrition insecurity. This is partially due to the homogenization of the global food supply with commodity crops. The reintroduction or introduction of neglected and underutilized species, minor, forgotten, and indigenous crops and landrace varieties to the wider food systems and further diversification have been outlined as the future strategies for tackling the above by the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization in their policy frameworks. Most of the above species/crops are marginalized and only used across local food systems and in research. With over 15,000 different seed banks and repositories worldwide, information transparency and communication are crucial for database searching and their effective utilization. Much confusion persists around the true nature of those plants, and this prohibits the efficient utilization of their economic potential. A linguistic corpus search and a systematic literature review were conducted using the six most popular collocates to the above terms, which were as follows: ancient, heirloom, heritage, traditional, orphan, and the more distinct term ‘landrace’. The results were interpreted using the Critical Discourse Analysis method. The definitions’ findings show that heirloom, heritage, and ancient are mainly used in the United Kingdom and USA, where they are used to describe ‘naturalized’ and ‘indigenized’ or ‘indigenous’ food crops with a strong affiliation to ‘family’ and the ‘act of passing seeds down from generation to generation’. Orphan crops, on the other hand, are often described as being ‘overlooked’ by growers and ‘underfunded’ by researchers. Landrace is most strongly affiliated with ‘locality’, ‘biocultural diversity’, and ‘indigenous’, and with genomics literature, where the characteristics are often discussed in the context of genetics and population biology. Contextualizing, most of the terms were found to be ‘arbitrary’ and ‘undefinable’ due to their continuing evolution in the socially accepted form of language, perhaps apart from landrace. The review has retrieved 58 definitions for the mentioned 6 terms, together with the primary key terms creating a tool to facilitate a better inter-sector communication and aid in policy
Student perceptions of diverse accents of English in a multilingual London post-1992 university
Get PDFPrevious research in language attitudes has focused primarily on the attitudes of international students towards different accents of English, the attitudes of home or domestic students in the UK remain still under researched. However, the higher education sector in England is not
homogenous, with the two-tier system between research intensive universities and teaching intensive, or post-1992 universities. There is a lack of understanding of the language attitudes towards diverse accents of English of this underrepresented group of students (Preece & Martin,
2009) found primarily in post-1992 institutions (Simpson & Cooke, 2009). With this in mind, this article has explored student perceptions of diverse accents at a post-1992 university through the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia.
Contrary to previous attitude studies, our findings suggest that the participants have higher levels of empathy towards varieties of English signaled through accent and that the heteroglossic context of London had had a positive impact on those attitudes.
However, the participants still expressed a detectable tension between conforming to the imposed norms of standard language use and pushing against them. The paper concludes with a call to challenge traditional deficit views of multilingualism and increase student critical language awareness in a safe structured environment
Celebrity Chefs and the Social Construction of Taste in Contemporary British Society
Get PDFThis thesis examines how celebrity chefs have become an integral part of contemporary
British culture through television and the media, serving as arbiters of taste and cultural
intermediaries. As a figure of contemporary culture, celebrity chefs reflect shifting attitudes
toward cooking, eating, ethics, consumption, class, and culinary capital.
Three paradigms were used to examine the construction of taste. Based on an
anthropological and structuralist perspective, the first theory proposes that taste is culturally
shaped and socially controlled. A second approach asserts that taste is influenced by
external factors and political and economic changes. Finally, a post-modern approach,
places the individual at the centre of the construction of taste.
Using a case study approach, the study developed a template initially based on the review
of literature which was then overlaid with the additional themes that emerged from the
scrutiny of chosen television shows and cookbooks of four celebrity chefs: Jamie Oliver,
Gordon Ramsay, Mary Berry and Nigella Lawson. The themes that emerged are: paradigms
of the construction of taste, class, capital, habitus, food as identity, lifestyle, chefs and the
media, gender roles and persona, education, civic and moral discourse, foodporn,
authenticity, legitimacy and expertise, professionalism, ethnicity and culture.
The key findings of the study found that the interpretation of the texts showed that the
influence of the chefs can be understood as key factor in understanding the social construct
of taste in modern British society. This study has shown that both the books and the television
shows contain recursive themes that enable the chefs to act as cultural intermediaries by
influencing beliefs about food, taste, class, and gender. It is these messages that in turn
shape the tastes of their audiences. This thesis has added to the existing body of knowledge
by explicitly positioning the celebrity chefs as co-producers of taste and cultural identity.
Potential research directions could include interrogations on audience reception and identity,
empowerment and accessibility, authenticity and cultural appropriation as well as values and
attitudes. The research can assist practitioners in harnessing the popularity and appeal of
the chefs. Restaurants should strike a balance between providing premium experiences and
ensuring affordability in order to appeal to a wider audience. They can also use the influence
of the chefs in marketing and development of new products and services. To prevent
unauthorised appropriation of recipes, practitioners must emphasise the importance of
context and sensitivity
Postpartum care and postpartum morbidity in Morocco: a mixed methods study
Get PDFThe postpartum period is high-risk for women’s physical and psychological health. This
is why the World Health Organisation recommends that women receive four
postpartum consultations within six weeks of giving birth, particularly in low-and-middle
income countries (LMIC) where maternal mortality and morbidity remain a concern. In
Morocco, the use of postpartum care (PPC) has stagnated at a low level (21%) since
2011, while the prevalence of postpartum morbidity (PPM) remains high (28.1%). Very
few studies have investigated PPC and its potential relation to PPM in Morocco. In
addition, the relationship between the non-utilisation of PPC and PPM has not been
systematically researched. This thesis addresses this public health problem in order
to understand the factors associated with the low rate of PPC utilisation in Morocco,
as well as the relationship between PPC and the occurrence of PPM. The overarching
aim of the research is to offer practical recommendations to increase PPC uptake and,
ultimately, improve women’s health.
The research answered five objectives: 1) to describe PPC uptake in LMIC, 2) to
determine the patterns of PPC uptake in Morocco and the factors associated with it,
3) to investigate the relationship between PPC uptake and PPM occurrence in
Morocco, 4) to explore women’s experience and perception of PPC and PPM in
Morocco, and finally, 5) to examine healthcare professionals’ experience in providing
PPC in Morocco.
These objectives were addressed using a pragmatic approach based on the use of
mixed methods. Three studies were conducted: 1) a systematic review and meta�analysis, 2) a secondary data analysis of a nationally representative database on
Moroccan maternal health representing 5593 women of childbearing age, and 3) a
qualitative study in two phases: the first one focusing on 17 women’s experiences of
PPC and the second one on 19 health professionals’ perceptions and experiences of
delivering it. The qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews
conducted face-to-face in diverse health facilities, at women’s homes in Morocco or
via phone calls.
Concerning PPC uptake and the factors associated with it, the systematic review and
meta-analysis presented an overview of the uptake of PPC in 35 LMIC, which provided
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the context within which to explore and understand the findings relating to the
Moroccan situation. Altogether, the prevalence of PPC utilisation in LMIC within six
weeks post-delivery was 55.4%. Twenty-one sociodemographic, environmental, and
obstetric factors were reviewed. Among them, urban place of residence, education,
exposure to mass media, antenatal care check-ups, wanted pregnancy, primiparity,
and delivery in a health facility by caesarean section all facilitated PPC utilisation.
Conversely, other factors hindered PPC utilisation namely the lack of knowledge about
PPC, poverty, women’s unemployment, women’s low level of autonomy in decision�making, disrespectful maternity care and young age (15-19 years old). From this
dataset, a meta-analysis based on 9 population-based studies analysing the
Demographic Health Survey concluded that the positive associations of urban place
of residence, women’s education level and employment as well as middle and higher
socioeconomic level were more strongly associated with PPC uptake within six weeks
after delivery (later PPC) than PPC provision within 48 hours post-delivery (early
PPC). Based on these findings, several hypotheses on the association between
sociodemographic, environmental, and obstetric factors and PPC uptake were tested
in the Moroccan context.
The sequential data analysis of the Moroccan data (quantitative and qualitative)
produced interesting results that corroborated some of the findings related to PPC
uptake in other LMIC. The quantitative study showed that in Morocco, between 2013
and 2017, the proportion of women who received early PPC before discharge (EPPC)
was 62.6% and 21.3% later within six weeks post-delivery (LPPC). The logistic
regression findings indicated that PPC utilisation before discharge was more likely to
occur for women who gave birth by caesarean section and those who received
postnatal care for their newborn baby. LPPC uptake was also more likely to be
associated with these two factors as well as women’s age (30-39), level of education
(some education versus none), socio-economic status (rich(er) vs poorer
socioeconomic status) and the frequency of antenatal consultations (at least one vs
none). Conversely, the multivariate analysis revealed that assisted delivery with only
nurses or midwives present (without doctor) was a barrier to LPPC uptake. Other
barriers were identified with the univariate analysis namely the absence of PPM, the
lack of knowledge and awareness of PPC, financial constraints, and the unavailability
of PPC provision.
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These findings were partly corroborated by the qualitative investigations which
highlighted that the mode of delivery (caesarean) and place of delivery (private
setting), good relationship between women and health professionals (HPs) and good
quality of care were important factors for women when choosing to attend PPC
consultations. On the other hand, the reasons explaining the non-utilisation of PPC
reported by women were related to the absence of knowledge and awareness of PPC
importance, not feeling PPM symptoms, the shortage of financial resources, and the
lack of PPC provision in public health centres. Finally, cultural barriers were also
reported by HPs as hindering women’s PPC utilisation.
With regards to PPM and their development, at the national scale, the quantitative
analyses showed that the prevalence of PPM (at least one) reached 28.3%, including
pelvic infections (76.2%), breast issues (51%), postpartum haemorrhage (16.7%) and
oedema (14.4%). The risk factors for developing PPM included vaginal delivery with
instruments and the occurrence of morbidities during pregnancy. Conversely, PPM
were less likely to occur among women with secondary and higher education and
those who attended antenatal consultations (at least one). The qualitative analysis
also highlighted the occurrence of psychological PPM, but these were largely under�reported by women and under-diagnosed by HPs. Other factors contributing to PPM
onset included women’s negative delivery experience as reported by the women, and
family’s influence and cultural practices as stated by HPs.
Finally, in this thesis the relationship between PPC uptake and PPM occurrence in
Morocco was also investigated and the results indicate that EPPC provided before
discharge was associated with LPPC utilisation and lower PPM onset. The results also
show that women seem to use LPPC if they experience PPM. In fact, the provision of
PPC was perceived as preventive by HPs, whereas it was seen as a curative recourse
by women.
The contribution to knowledge of this work is to provide insights into a wider range of
factors, compared to existing literature, associated with the low rate of PPC utilisation
in Morocco. The research also identified novel inter-personal and ‘softer’ factors that
are hindering or contributing to PPC utilisation including family’s influence, cultural
beliefs and practices, relationship between HPs and women, alongside differences in
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quality of care between public and private health structures. These are in addition to
demographic and socio-economic factors, which constitute a social gradient and result
in health inequalities. The research also brings new insights into the women’s and
HPs’ perceptions of PPC – with the former viewing it as a curative measure while the
latter consider it to be preventive. In addition, the research contributes new knowledge
by furthering our understanding of the way psychological PPM are disclosed and
managed. It also sheds light on the relationship between PPC uptake and PPM
occurrence, with the association between the two variables relating to the timing of
PPC use, that is to say that receiving EPPC before discharge prevents PPM onset
whereas receiving LPPC within six weeks post-discharge was associated with PPM
symptoms.
The research has important practical implications with a need for a holistic approach
including the views of women, HPs and policymakers to increase PPC uptake and
prevent PPM. This implies a need for behaviour change from all parties, a need to
change some healthcare practices and organisation of care, and a need for health
promotion interventions to raise the awareness of women and their families about the
importance of PPC to prevent or treat PPM. Measures aimed at women, HPs and
policymakers could positively contribute towards Morocco’s aim to comply with the
WHO recommendations on PPC utilisation and, by extension, to decrease maternal
mortality and morbidity
Danny Kleinman interview
Get PDFInterview with film director Danny Kleinman about his career in screen advertising