Objectives: The study aim was to explore the knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes of Iraqi physicians regarding generic and locally manufactured medicines. Methods: A total of 124 physicians were involved in this cross -sectional study. The convenience sample was collected from five public hospitals in Baghdad. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed and collected in-person. Fisher's Exact Test was used to measure the association between physician years of experience, gender and categorical (perception and knowledge) variables. Results: Most respondent answers regarding the knowledge of generic medicines were incorrect. Only up to one-third of the participants knew that generic medicines are therapeutically equivalent to brand name medicines (26.6%), as safe as brand name medicines (34.7%) and required to meet similar safety standards as brand name medicines (12.1%). With respect to perception, many physicians had negative perceptions about generic medicines such as viewing generic medicines as lower quality (57.3%) and cause more side effects (41.1%) compared to brand name medicines. Regarding physician attitudes toward generic medicines, about two-thirds (64.5%) of the physicians were willing to prescribe low cost medicines; however, only about half (51.6%) of the physicians reported they offer generic medicines to their patients. Finally, 64.5% of the participants were not comfortable with pharmacist replacing prescribed brand with generic medicines. Conclusions: In general, Iraqi physicians have negative perceptions and attitudes about generic and locally manufactured medicines. Significant gaps were identified in the knowledge and perceptions among physicians regarding generic medicines especially in relation to efficacy and safety of generic medicines. Article Type: Original Research
Abstract-This work explores some important number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that may affect on the quality of service (QoS) in 5G networks. The proposed QoS necessities are based on the analysis of functional requirements to 5G networks and traffic parameters for HD video and massive M2M services, which will be highly demanded in 2020. One of the 5G development paradigms is the network functions virtualization (NFV) including cloud radio access and cloud core networks. This work has planned the concept of function blocks; cloud QoS management function (CQMF) and cloud QoS control function (CQCF) to control and monitor QoS, which is implemented as part of the 5G network cloud infrastructure.Index Terms-5G, M2M, QoS, video services, virtualization.
Many consumers of electric power have excesses in their electric power consumptions that exceed the permissible limit by the electrical power distribution stations, and then we proposed a validation approach that works intelligently by applying machine learning (ML) technology to teach electrical consumers how to properly consume without wasting energy expended. The validation approach is one of a large combination of intelligent processes related to energy consumption which is called the efficient energy consumption management (EECM) approaches, and it connected with the internet of things (IoT) technology to be linked to Google Firebase Cloud where a utility center used to check whether the consumption of the efficient energy is satisfied. It divides the measured data for actual power (A_p ) of the electrical model into two portions: the training portion is selected for different maximum actual powers, and the validation portion is determined based on the minimum output power consumption and then used for comparison with the actual required input power. Simulation results show the energy expenditure problem can be solved with good accuracy in energy consumption by reducing the maximum rate (A_p ) in a given time (24) hours for a single house, as well as electricity’s bill cost, is reduced.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic, progressive, inflammatory autoimmune disease of unidentified etiology, associated with articular, extra-articular and systemic manifestation that require long-standing treatment. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an essential factor that affects adherence of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is an essential for better adherence. The purpose of the current study was to measure beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with Rheumatoid arthritis and to determine possible association between this belief and some patient-certain factors. This study is a cross-sectional study carried out on 250 already diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis patients who attended to Baghdad Teaching Hospital/Medical City/Rheumatology department. The mean age of the patients was (50.8 ± 13.1 years). Belief about medicines was measured via the Arabic version of the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire. The majority of the patients (88%) had strong beliefs in the necessity of treatment (specific-necessity score greater than specific-concern). There was a significant direct correlation between age, male gender, number of other chronic disease, disease activity score 28 and clinical disease activity index with specific necessity, and direct correlation between clinical disease activity index with specific concern. Future studies should investigate how interventional approaches addressing these predictors may lead to improve beliefs about medicines among rheumatoid arthritis patients and their impression on disease control.
<p><span>This research deals with the feasibility of a mobile robot to navigate and discover its location at unknown environments, and then constructing maps of these navigated environments for future usage. In this work, we proposed a modified Extended Kalman Filter- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKF-SLAM) technique which was implemented for different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks. Then, the detectable landmarks will play an important role in controlling the overall navigation process and EKF-SLAM technique’s performance. MATLAB simulation results of the EKF-SLAM technique come with better performance as compared with an odometry approach performance in terms of measuring the mean square error, especially when increasing the number of landmarks. After that, we simulate and evaluate a mobile robot platform named TurtleBot2e in Gazebo simulator software to achieve the using of the SLAM technique for a different environment using the Rviz library which was built on Robot Operating System in Linux. The main conclusion comes with this work is the simulation and implementation of the SLAM technique using two software platforms separately (MATLAB and ROS) in different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks so a few number of landmark will make the mobile robot loses its path.</span></p>
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