Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic in one major teaching hospital in Baghdad City, Iraq. The intervention included simple yet specific instructions that were given both orally and in written form to the study samples to enable them to manage their craving to smoke for 6 weeks. The smoking triggers were assessed using Why Do You Smoke questionnaire. Participants were randomly allocated to receive either the nurse-led intervention or standard care. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent sample t-tests, logistic regression, and two-sided tests.Results: Stress reduction was the dominant smoking trigger among subjects. The percentage of participants who were either able to completely quit smoking or reduce the number of smoked cigarettes per day (n=19, 29.7%; n=28, 43.8%, respectively) was greater in the study group than those in the control group (n=5, 5.8%; n=5, 5.8%, respectively). Study findings demonstrated significant differences in the inability to improve readiness to quit smoking between the intervention group and control group (p=0.000) at the sixth-week follow-up.Conclusion: The tailored nursing intervention was effective for a successful achievement of smoking reduction and cessation among patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, and a potential to equip nurses in clinical settings to support patients to achieve this is recommended.
The seizure epilepsy is risky because it happens randomly and leads to death in some cases. The standard epileptic seizures monitoring system involves video/EEG (electro-encephalography), which bothers the patient, as EEG electrodes are attached to the patient’s head.
Seriously, helping or alerting the patient before the seizure is one of the issue that attracts the researchers and designers attention. So that there are spectrums of portable seizure detection systems available in markets which are based on non-EEG signal.
The aim of this article is to provide a literature survey for the latest articles that cover many issues in the field of designing portable real-time seizure detection that includes the use of multiple
... Show MoreMachine learning models have recently provided great promise in diagnosis of several ophthalmic disorders, including keratoconus (KCN). Keratoconus, a noninflammatory ectatic corneal disorder characterized by progressive cornea thinning, is challenging to detect as signs may be subtle. Several machine learning models have been proposed to detect KCN, however most of the models are supervised and thus require large well-annotated data. This paper proposes a new unsupervised model to detect KCN, based on adapted flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and the k-means algorithm. We will evaluate the proposed models using corneal data collected from 5430 eyes at different stages of KCN severity (1520 healthy, 331 KCN1, 1319 KCN2, 1699 KCN3 a
... Show MoreIn this study, the dynamic modeling and step input tracking control of single flexible link is studied. The Lagrange-assumed modes approach is applied to get the dynamic model of a planner single link manipulator. A Step input tracking controller is suggested by utilizing the hybrid controller approach to overcome the problem of vibration of tip position through motion which is a characteristic of the flexible link system. The first controller is a modified version of the proportional-derivative (PD) rigid controller to track the hub position while sliding mode (SM) control is used for vibration damping. Also, a second controller (a fuzzy logic based proportional-integral plus derivative (PI+D) control scheme) is developed for both vibra
... Show MoreIn this work chemical vapor deposition method (CVD) for the production of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been improved by the addition of S. Steel mesh container (SSMC) inside which the catalyst (Fe/Al2O3) was placed. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) investigation method used to study nanotubes produced, showed that high yield of two types of (CNTs) obtained, single wall carbon nanotube (SWCNTs) with diameter and length of less than 50nm and several micrometers respectively and nanocoil tubes with a diameter and length of less than 100nm and several micrometers respectively. The chemical analysis of (CNTs) reveals that the main component is carbon (94%) and a little amount of Al (0.32%), Fe (2.22%) the reminder is oxygen. It was also fou
... Show MoreVirtual organization is similar to traditional organization in principles, but is different in the ways it operates. It requires small creation costs compared to the traditional and it uses electronic commerce as the market place and distribution channel for its products and services.The aim of this article is to applying electronic commerce for a proposed virtual organization. The tools used to build an effective web application for virtual organization to provide virtual environment to the customers to do the transaction activities online include PHP, MySQL and Apache. HTML is used for displaying forms and tables and JavaScript is used for verification in client side. Finally, connecting it to 2Checkout.com company as a third party to per
... Show MoreIn this paper, a literature survey was introduced to study of enhancing the hazy images , because most of the images captured in outdoor images have low contrast, color distortion, and limited visual because the weather conditions such as haze and that leads to decrease the quality of images capture. This study is of great importance in many applications such as surveillance, detection, remote sensing, aerial image, recognition, radar, etc. The published researches on haze removal are divided into several divisions, some of which depend on enhancement the image, some of which depend on the physical model of deformation, and some of them depend on the number of images used and are divided into single-image and multiple images dehazing model
... Show More