Bruce MacLeod

Assessing population dynamics in a rural african society: The navrongo demographic surveillance system

In 1993, the Navrongo Health Research Centre launched a new demographic research system for monitoring the impact of health service interventions in a rural district of northern Ghana. The Navrongo Demographic Surveillance System uses automated software generation procedures that greatly simplify the preparation of complex database management systems. This paper reviews the Navrongo model for data collection, as well as features of the Navrongo system that have led to its replication in other health research projects requiring individual-level longitudinal demographic data. Demographic research results for the first 2 years of system operation are indicative of a pretransitional rural society with high fertility, exceedingly high mortality risks, and pronounced seasonal out-migration.

Rapid achievement of the child survival millennium development goal : evidence from the navrongo experiment in Northern Ghana

Objective  To determine the impact of deploying nurses and volunteers to village locations on demographic and health outcomes.

The Architecture of a Software System for Supporting Community-based Primary Health Care with Mobile Technology: The Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) Initiative in Ghana

This paper describes the software architecture of a system designed in response to the health development potential of two concomitant trends in poor countries: i) The rapid expansion of community health worker deployment, now estimated to involve over a million workers in Africa and Asia, and ii) the global proliferation of mobile technology coverage and use. Known as the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) Initiative, our system adapts and integrates existing software applications for mobile data collection, electronic medical records, and interactive voice response to bridge health information gaps in rural Africa. MoTeCH calculates the upcoming schedule of care for each client and, when care is due, notifies the client and community health workers responsible for that client. MoTeCH also automates the aggregation of health status and health service delivery information for routine reports. The paper concludes with a summary of lessons learned and future system development needs.

The impact of immunization on the association between poverty and child survival: evidence from Kassena-Nankana District of northern Ghana.

Background: Research conducted in Africa has consistently demonstrated that parental poverty and low educational attainment adversely affect child survival. Research conducted elsewhere has demonstrated that low-cost vaccines against preventable diseases reduce childhood mortality. Therefore, the extension of vaccination to impoverished populations is widely assumed to diminish equity effects. Recent evidence that childhood mortality is increasing in many countries where vaccination programmes are active challenges this assumption. Data and methods: This paper marshals data from accurate and complete immunization records and survival histories for 18,368 children younger than five years in a rural northern Ghanaian population that is generally impoverished, but where family wealth and parental educational differentials exist nonetheless. Time-conditional Weibull hazard models are estimated to test the hypothesis that childhood immunization offsets the detrimental effects of poverty and low educational attainment. Conclusions: Findings show that the adverse effects of poverty disappear and that the effects of educational attainment are reduced in survival models that control for immunization status. This finding lends empirical support to policies that promote immunization as a strategic component of poverty-reduction programmes.

An algorithm for the 2D guillotine cutting stock problem

Abstract The two-dimensional guillotine cutting stock problem seeks to apply a sequence of guillotine (edge to edge) cuts to extract a collection of smaller rectangles from a stock piece. In this paper an O(n3) approximation algorithm for the two-dimensional guillotine cutting stock problem is presented. The algorithm considers each rectangle, in turn, and attempts to locate a guillotine feasible position on the stock piece. The algorithm has the property that a position will be located for the n-th rectangle if and only if such a feasible placement exists. This paper establishes the efficiency and effectiveness of the new algorithm by presenting computational results.

Software Extensibility Strategies for Health and Demographic Systems in Low-Income Countries

Software systems used by health research centers in low-income countries typically need to be maintained and upgraded by individuals who do not have formal Computer Science education. Without careful planning, these data management software systems can require years of technical assistance from highly trained specialists. This work proposes software design strategies to minimize the complexity of maintaining a Java based enterprise scale software application in low-income countries. In this paper we identify various extension mechanisms. The goal is to significantly reduce the complexity required for users to tailor the system to their own particular projects.

Integrating Mobile Collection Software with Health Applications

This paper describes and analyzes three approaches for integrating mobile data collection software and health applications. The first approach uses a domain-specific language module that is installed in a health application that communicates directly with the mobile data collection software. The second approach uses Mirth Connect to integrate the mobile collection software with a health application. The third approach is writing custom code required to integrate mobile data collection software with a health application. In the final section of this paper, we provide an analysis of the three approaches, and make recommendations on which approach should be used based on the resources available to a health facility.

The Household Registration System: A Database Program Generator for Longitudinal Studies of Households

Efforts to understand social, behavioral, and health characteristics of populations often require longitudinal studies of households Experimental designs, combined with longitudinal monitoring, permit many causal inferences that are not possible with cross-sectional surveys. While such studies retain their conceptual appeal, practical problems often limit their application. Data can be complex to manage, and results can be delayed. This paper presents a description of a microcomputer software system that addresses data management problems associated with longitudinal surveys of households. Using relational logic from household surveillance systems developed for Bangladesh and Indonesia as a model, an automated program generator is proposed that greatly simplifies the task of systems development for a family of applications. The paper reviews features of the database software that make up the output of this system and presents examples that illustrate the flexibility of the software generator.

A Principled Approach to Solving Complex Discrete Optimization Problems

ABSTRACT In this work we report on a general and extensible framework, called OPL, for quickly constructing reasonable solutions to a broad class of complex discrete optimization problems. Our approach rests on the observation that many such problems can be represented by linking together variants of well-understood primitive optimization problems. We exploit this representation by building libraries of solution methods for the primitive problems. These library methods are then suitably composed to build solutions for the original problem. The vehicle routing problem and its generalizations, which involve not only routing but also delivery scheduling, crew scheduling, etc., is a significant and extensively investigated area of operations research. In this paper we report on OPL definitions and solutions for a wide variety of such problems.