Browsing by Author "Mekuria, Birhanu"

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    Behavior of Children With Hyperactivity and Teachers' Response to Meet Their Educational Needs
    (Addis Ababa University, 2010-06) Mekuria, Birhanu; Teklemariam, Alemayehu
    Many studies have been conducted concerning the behavior of children with hyperactivity and the problems they face both within educational settings and social life. Unless these children are provided with appropriate behavioral, academic and social interventions as early as possible, they are at risk not only to develop academic underachievement and impaired social interactions, but also their overall development will be deteriorated. However, due to lack of adequate studies, it is difficult to pinpoint the existing problems, research gaps, identification practices and trends of educational provisions and supports for children with the disorder in the Ethiopian context. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the behavioral, social and academic characteristics of children with hyperactivity in the regular classroom and teachers' response to meet their educational needs. To achieve this objective, qualitative case study design was employed. Direct systematic observations, in-depth one-on-one interviews and document reviews were the instruments used to collect data. Four children with hyperactive behavior, their classroom teachers, parents and peers who were selected purposefully participated in the study. The collected data were analyzed qualitatively by using case by case and cross case analysis. The findings of the study have revealed that the four children display hyperactive behavior and their hyperactive behavior is severe enough in disturbing the class. Moreover, the hyperactive behavior negatively affects not only the children's academic performance and social interactions but also it presents great challenges to teachers, parents and peers. Due to lack of adequate knowledge and training among teachers, unavailability of facilities and materials and parents' unwillingness to work collaboratively with teachers concerning their children's behavior problems, the children are not provided with sufficient and appropriate educational and social supports by their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, based on the findings of the study, some valuable measures were recommended which enable teachers and parents to help children with the disorder get the best socially and academically
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    Context Information Refinement for Pervasive Medical Systems
    (Addis Ababa University, 2007-06) Mekuria, Birhanu; Bekele, Dawit (PhD)
    In pervasive medical systems with context-aware computing facility, the quality of decisions made by medical professionals is influenced by the quality of context information supplied by the context management sub-system. Central to context management is context information refinement aimed at deriving context information that can assist applications in making valuable decisions about what to deliver to users. In this thesis, we identified the shortcomings of existing works in relation to context information refinement in pervasive medical systems. The shortcomings are lack of adequate consideration for: quality parameters of context information, relevance of context information and particular requirements of the pervasive healthcare domain. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we proposed a context information refinement architecture that facilitates and coordinates the refinement procedure starting from acquisition of context information up until the refined context information is delivered to the target application (user) in a pervasive medical system by addressing the abovementioned shortcomings. The architecture is composed of the client mobile device end and the context refinement server. The client mobile device end consists of components responsible for tracking the device context (E.g. location), listening to incoming events from the server, providing interface for specifying service constraints and local caching services. On the context refinement server side, the major components are the reasoning and decision engine that performs ontology-supported context reasoning, the service parameters manager that maintains up-to-date list of service constraints, the context ontology that models the concepts and relationships between concepts in the pervasive healthcare domain and the context acquisition component that collects and aggregates context data from potential context data sources like sensors. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed architecture, we developed a prototype that implements the core components of the proposed architecture. The implementation has been evaluated with a real-life pervasive healthcare scenario and encouraging initial results have been obtained as an indication to the usability of the proposed architecture in a reallife setting.
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    Context Information Refinement for Pervasive Medical Systems
    (Addis Ababa University, 2007-06) Mekuria, Birhanu; Bekele, Dawit (PhD)
    In pervasive medical systems with context-aware computing facility, the quality of decisions made by medical professionals is influenced by the quality of context information supplied by the context management sub-system. Central to context management is context information refinement aimed at deriving context information that can assist applications in making valuable decisions about what to deliver to users. In this thesis, we identified the shortcomings of existing works in relation to context information refinement in pervasive medical systems. The shortcomings are lack of adequate consideration for: quality parameters of context information, relevance of context information and particular requirements of the pervasive healthcare domain. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we proposed a context information refinement architecture that facilitates and coordinates the refinement procedure starting from acquisition of context information up until the refined context information is delivered to the target application (user) in a pervasive medical system by addressing the abovementioned shortcomings. The architecture is composed of the client mobile device end and the context refinement server. The client mobile device end consists of components responsible for tracking the device context (E.g. location), listening to incoming events from the server, providing interface for specifying service constraints and local caching services. On the context refinement server side, the major components are the reasoning and decision engine that performs ontology-supported context reasoning, the service parameters manager that maintains up-to-date list of service constraints, the context ontology that models the concepts and relationships between concepts in the pervasive healthcare domain and the context acquisition component that collects and aggregates context data from potential context data sources like sensors. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed architecture, we developed a prototype that implements the core components of the proposed architecture. The implementation has been evaluated with a real-life pervasive healthcare scenario and encouraging initial results have been obtained as an indication to the usability of the proposed architecture in a reallife setting.