OBJECTIVES China is one of the 22 tuberculosis (TB) high-burden countries in the world. As TB is a major public health problem in China, spatial analysis could be applied to detect geographic distribution of TB clusters for targeted intervention on TB epidemics. METHODS Spatial analysis was applied for detecting TB clusters on county-based TB notification data in the national notifiable infec...

OBJECTIVES This study sought to determine public opinion on alternatives to project-specific consent for use of their personal information for health research. DESIGN The authors conducted a fixed-response random-digit dialed telephone survey of 1,230 adults across Canada. MEASUREMENTS We measured attitudes toward privacy and health research; trust in different institutions to keep informat...

AIM To study the epidemiology of childhood tuberculosis (TB) in a developing country. SETTING Two urban communities of Cape Town, South Africa with a TB case notification rate of 1149/100 000. DESIGN Retrospective descriptive study using the national population census (1991), 10 year official TB notification records, and a geographical information system. RESULTS The case notification rat...

means people at high risk of an STD, many of whom are unaware that they have been exposed, are contacted and encouraged to attend for screening and treatment. Partner notification endeavours to reduce the burden of asymptomatic disease in the community and shorten the average period of infectiousness for a given disease, in the expectation that this will reduce disease transmission within the p...

Beyond ubiquitous computing, is the advent of disposable computing, occurring when the price of an embedded computer becomes insignificant compared to the cost of goods. Current software and network architectures and their associated programming paradigms will not scale to this new world. The necessity of catering for the constant change in number and type of devices of interest to a user, as w...

Bioinformatics can be considered as a new field of study and it promises a vast exploration area (Carzaniga., Rosenblum., Wolf ., 2001). In order to expedite the maturity in this area, a proper and supportive portal where all researchers could gather and cooperate in conducting their research need to be established. One of the features in a portal that can assist Bioinformatics researchers in p...

Our research explores how interruptive notifications support task management in a desktop environment. We conducted two user studies with a community of open source software users and developers to explore their experience with interruptive notifications. We found that certain kinds of notifications support multitasking, task prioritization, task management, as well as influence task disruption...

One of the most important threats to global public health, especially in developing countries is parasitic infections. These infections are very common in children and young people especially those who kept in kindergarten and primary schools. Because of the high population density and sometimes by the lack of adequate hygiene, these places are prone to parasitic infections. Infestation causes ...

OBJECTIVE To see if, in the diagnosis of infant infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Zambia, turnaround times could be reduced by using an automated notification system based on mobile phone texting. METHODS In Zambia's Southern province, dried samples of blood from infants are sent to regional laboratories to be tested for HIV with polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Turnaround ...

This study investigates the use of cognitive architectures for usability and software engineering of notification system user interfaces. These interfaces, which are special in that they are used in a divided-attention situation, require careful study of multi-tasking support of the information design. Cognitive architectures appear promising for this type of research, since they attempt to mod...