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.
<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
... Show MoreIn recent years, there has been a rise in interest in the study of antibiotic occurrence in the aquatic environment due to the negative consequences of prolonged exposure and the potential for bacterial antibiotic resistance. Most antibiotic residues from treated wastewater end up in the aquatic environment as they are not eliminated in facilities that treat wastewater. Antibiotics must be identified in influent and effluent wastewater using reliable analytical techniques for several reasons. Firstly, monitoring antibiotic presence in aquatic environments. Secondly, assessing environmental risks, computing wastewater treatment plant removal efficiencies, and estimating antibiotic consumption. Therefore, this work aims to provide an overview
... Show MoreThis paper includes a comparison between denoising techniques by using statistical approach, principal component analysis with local pixel grouping (PCA-LPG), this procedure is iterated second time to further improve the denoising performance, and other enhancement filters were used. Like adaptive Wiener low pass-filter to a grayscale image that has been degraded by constant power additive noise, based on statistics estimated from a local neighborhood of each pixel. Performs Median filter of the input noisy image, each output pixel contains the Median value in the M-by-N neighborhood around the corresponding pixel in the input image, Gaussian low pass-filter and Order-statistic filter also be used. Experimental results shows LPG-PCA method
... Show MoreIn the last few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining remarkable attention in both academic and industrial worlds. The main goal of the IoT is laying on describing everyday objects with different capabilities in an interconnected fashion to the Internet to share resources and to carry out the assigned tasks. Most of the IoT objects are heterogeneous in terms of the amount of energy, processing ability, memory storage, etc. However, one of the most important challenges facing the IoT networks is the energy-efficient task allocation. An efficient task allocation protocol in the IoT network should ensure the fair and efficient distribution of resources for all objects to collaborate dynamically with limited energy. The canonic
... Show MoreThe aim of the research is to identify the extent of the direct and indirect relationship of the population growth of the cities as a result of the urbanization process witnessed by the Arab region for the urban development of the city structures and their formative structures, changing the planning criteria of some cities and the extent of their changes in spatial and temporal dimensions and their relation to the standards of the western cities. In changing the concept of the modern Arab city, such as the emergence of new functional uses affecting the change in the pattern of formal formations of its urban fabric associated with its ancient morphology and distinctive human nature. The research seeks to identify the extent to which plann
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XML is being incorporated into the foundation of E-business data applications. This paper addresses the problem of the freeform information that stored in any organization and how XML with using this new approach will make the operation of the search very efficient and time consuming. This paper introduces new solution and methodology that has been developed to capture and manage such unstructured freeform information (multi information) depending on the use of XML schema technologies, neural network idea and object oriented relational database, in order to provide a practical solution for efficiently management multi freeform information system.
Planning of cities show great attention on streets planning as one of the most structural component foundations for cities, that providing many functional needs and connect parts of the city each other, and work as a commercial and services activities centers. Instead of this highly focused on distributing streets with different streets types such as economical and trading and housing streets. This concerned was only on the dimensions and scales of different types of vehicles and their movement. When scale and dimension and movement of mans were as a second priority in designing and planning streets. Which came's first for traditional streets. The research try to submit some designs guides for planners that contribute in re conce
... Show MoreThis paper presents designing an adaptive state feedback controller (ASFC) for a magnetic levitation system (MLS), which is an unstable system and has high nonlinearity and represents a challenging control problem. First, a nonadaptive state feedback controller (SFC) is designed by linearization about a selected equilibrium point and designing a SFC by pole-placement method to achieve maximum overshoot of 1.5% and settling time of 1s (5% criterion). When the operating point changes, the designed controller can no longer achieve the design specifications, since it is designed based on a linearization about a different operating point. This gives rise to utilizing the adaptive control scheme to parameterize the state feedback controll
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