BackgroundThe World Health Organization has recommended at least four antenatal care (ANC) visits and skilled attendants at birth. Most pregnant women in rural communities in low-income countries do not achieve the minimum recommended visits and deliver without skilled attendants. With the aim of increasing number of ANC visits, reducing home deliveries, and supplementing care given by ANC clinics, a proposed system based on low-cost mobile phones and portable ultrasound scan machines was piloted.MethodsA sample of 323 pregnant women from four rural communities in the Central Region of Ghana were followed within a 11-month project. In each community, at least one health worker was trained and equipped with a mobile phone to promote ANC and hospital deliveries in her own community. If women cannot attend ANC, technicians acquired scans by using portable ultrasound machines in her community directly and sent them almost in real time to be analyzed by a gynecologist in an urban hospital. A preliminary survey to assess ANC status preceding the pilot study was conducted. During this, one hundred women who had had pregnancies within five years prior to the study were interviewed.ResultsThe preliminary survey showed that women who attended ANC were less likely to have a miscarriage and more likely to have delivery at hospital or clinic than those who did not, and women who attained at least four ANC visits were less likely to practice self-medication. Among the women involved in the project, 40 gave birth during the period of observation. The proposed prenatal care approach showed that 62.5 % of pregnant women who gave birth during the observation period included in the project (n=40) had their labor attended in clinics or hospitals as against 37.5 % among the cases reported in the pre-survey. One case of ectopic and two cases of breech pregnancies were detected during the pilot through the proposed approach, and appropriate medical interventions were sought.ConclusionOur results show that the proposed prenatal care approach can make quality ANC accessible in rural communities where pregnant women have not been able to access proper ANC.

We use factorisations of the local isometry groups arising in 3d gravity for Lorentzian and Euclidean signatures and any value of the cosmological constant to construct associated bicrossproduct quantum groups via semidualisation. In this way we obtain quantum doubles of the Lorentz and rotation groups in 3d, as well as κ-Poincaré algebras whose associated r-matrices have spacelike, timelike and lightlike deformation parameters. We confirm and elaborate the interpretation of semiduality proposed in [13] as the exchange of the cosmological length scale and the Planck mass in the context of 3d quantum gravity. In particular, semiduality gives a simple understanding of why the quantum double of the Lorentz group and the κ-Poincaré algebra with spacelike deformation parameter are both associated to 3d gravity with vanishing cosmological constant, while the κ-Poincaré algebra with a timelike deformation parameter can only be associated to 3d gravity if one takes the Planck mass to be imaginary.

We show that the bicrossproduct model C[SU * 2 ]◮⊳U (su 2 ) quantum Poincaré group in 2+1 dimensions acting on the quantum spacetime [x i , t] = ıλx i is related by a Drinfeld and module-algebra twist to the quantum double U (su 2 )⊲

We study the interplay between double cross sum decompositions of a given Lie algebra and classical r-matrices for its semidual. For a class of Lie algebras which can be obtained by a process of generalised complexification we derive an expression for classical r-matrices of the semidual Lie bialgebra in terms of the data which determines the decomposition of the original Lie algebra. Applied to the local isometry Lie algebras arising in three-dimensional gravity, decomposition, and semidualisation yields the main class of non-trivial r-matrices for the Euclidean and Poincaré group in three dimensions. In addition, the construction links the r-matrices with the Bianchi classification of three-dimensional real Lie algebras. C 2013 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.