This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on how best to design and support community health worker (CHW) programmes to maximise their positive impact. CHWs are laypeople trained to promote health among their peers. To do so they are commonly tasked with providing basic curative services, promoting the use of existing health services, facilitating cultural mediation between communities and healthcare providers and encouraging critical reflection and dialogue on social health issues. This paper presents a case study of a CHW project in rural Uttarakhand, north India, called the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) programme. While the ASHA programme is not specifically targeting HIV/AIDS, CHW programmes have been flagged as a key means of addressing health resource shortages in poor countries, especially in relation to HIV/AIDS. This study of the ASHA programme provides insights into how best to support CHW programmes in general, including those focused on HIV/AIDS. The research involved 25 interviews and five focus groups with ASHAs, health professionals and community members as well as over 100 hours of non-participant observation at public health centres. The research investigated contextual features of the programme that are hindering the ASHAs' capacity to increase quantitative health outcomes and act as cultural mediators and agents of social change. Research found that ASHAs were institutionally limited by: (1) the outcome-based remuneration structure; (2) poor institutional support; (3) the rigid hierarchical structure of the health system; and (4) a dearth of participation at the community level. The conclusion suggests that progressive policy on CHW programmes must be backed up by concrete institutional support structures to enable CHWs to fulfil their role.
Abstruct-The demand for drive-by-wire, telematics, entertainment, multimedia, pre-crash warning, highway guidance, remote diagnostic, etc. will significantly increase the complexity of a vehicle's sofhrvare modules. From time to time, the vehicle's software may need to be updated due to many reasons such as the introduction of new features in vehicles, changing the navigation map, fixing software hugs, etc.Software updates must be done in secure modes to avoid any fuhtre disasters due to malfunctions of the vehicle. I n this paper, we propose an architecture for secure software uploads in vehicles. We provide a detailed description of the secure software upload process.
U.S federal and State governments invest millions of dollars for enforcing parking control in the metro city area. Tasks like parking enforcement, towing of illegally parked vehicles and maintenance require many man-hours and resources. The parking control and revenue system in the metro are essentially dependant on devices like coin or token based parking meters, which require the use of exact change and is therefore cumbersome. Also a patrol officer is required to monitor these spaces constantly. This entails the need for a more eflicient and redundant system. In this paper, we propose an architecture for automated parking meter and driver assistance system that shaIl be connected to a centralized tramc control authority responsible for parking enforcement and toll collection. This system would provide a more efficient and redundant way of enforcilig parking control and toll collection and also assist drivers in metro area for searching an available parking space. The abovementioned architecture enables automated parking toll collection.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.