Research Title: COVID-19: time to rethink about strategy for palliative care in resource-poor settings.

Author: Maha Mohammed Wahbi Atout, Published Year: 2020

International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 26

Faculty: Nursing

Abstract: The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on healthcare facilities and health professionals globally, especially in resource-poor settings, including those in African countries This article aims to highlight the challenges of providing palliative care in African countries and to forecast what this means in light of the public health issues surrounding COVID-19. According to the Coronavirus in Africa Tracker (BBC News, 2020), there are 925 369 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in Africa as of 31 July 2020, of which 19 605 are confirmed deaths. While 577947 patients are reported to have recovered, there remains a high number of active confirmed cases in the continent, at 327818. These numbers could be higher, but are underreported, due to ineffective reporting systems, the inability to diagnose on a large scale and people not recognising the symptoms of COVID-19. With the anticipation that COVID-19 will have devastating effects on Africa (Hopman et al, 2020; Nkengasong and Mankoula, 2020), this will cause a surge in the need for palliative care and medical supplies. The World Health Organization (2018) defines palliative care as any support that improves the quality of life of patients and their families experiencing lifethreatening illnesses, through the prevention and relief of suffering, whether physical, psychosocial or spiritual care

Keywords: COVID-19; palliative care; resource poor settings; strategy

Research Title: Communication styles between family carers and children with leukaemia in occupied Palestinian territory

Author: Maha Mohammed Wahbi Atout, Published Year: 2020

Journal of Child Health Care ,

Faculty: Nursing

Abstract: This study explores the experience of communication regarding the care of children with cancer, from the perspective of family carers, children and health professionals in occupied Palestinian territory. This study employed an ethnographic collective qualitative case study approach, which was applied in one oncology unit in a Palestinian hospital. Participant observation and semistructured interviews were used. This study only reports the findings of the interviews with the participating family carers. Fifteen interviews were conducted with family carers (n = 14 children), namely mothers (n = 7), grandmothers (n = 7) and a father (n = 1). The findings reveal that styles of information were given to children by their family carers: minimal/practical information, gradual information, false information, reassuring information and several sources of information. The term cancer was avoided in the discussion of the disease to ameliorate the negative effect of this term, which is considered taboo in the studied culture. Despite the recent trend emphasising the importance of parents communicating openly with their children with cancer, the findings of this study suggest that such open communication is not accepted by all parents. Hence, a case-by-case strategy could be adopted to treat each child in a way that is individual to that child and their culture.

Keywords: Cancer, children, communication, family carers, leukaemia

Research Title: Nurses' perceptions toward factors that cause medication errors in Jordan: A qualitative study.

Author: Maha Mohammed Wahbi Atout, Published Year: 2020

Perspectives in Psychiatric care ,

Faculty: Nursing

Abstract: Aims The aim of this study was to investigate nurses' experiences related to medication errors (MEs) from the perspective of Jordanian nurses. This article reports the findings concerning the factors that cause MEs from the perspectives of Jordanian nurses. Background MEs are critical issues facing healthcare providers and health institutions. Most of the studies on MEs were conducted in Western countries. However, there is little research that seeks to understand this issue in the developing countries and Jordan is one of these countries. Design A qualitative descriptive approach was used in three hospitals in different clinical settings in Jordan. Methods Individual semi‐structured face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with 24 nurses. Results The data that emerged from the interviews was arranged and contextualized in two major themes, individual and systemic factors, that explained the main causes of MEs. From the individual side, lack of knowledge and experience ranked as the highest concerns, and from the systematic side workload was the most important factor. Conclusion This study provides an opportunity for stakeholders and Jordanian managers to increase their awareness of these factors and address them in the future, thereby increasing the level of care provided in their health organizations.

Keywords: barriers of reporting, error reporting, Jordan, medication errors, nurses, qualitative

Research Title: Real-time traffic distribution prediction protocol (TDPP) for vehicular networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2020

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 152

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Over downtown and highway road scenarios several applications have been proposed to enhance the quality of driving trips there. Safety, efficiency and entertainment services are provided to vehicles through several advanced technologies. Many of these applications require accurate investigation of the traffic characteristics and distributions over the area of interest in order to successfully provide the targeted services. To mention a few, path recommendation protocols, traffic light scheduling algorithms and driving assistance techniques need specific, detailed and accurate traffic distribution reports regarding the investigated area of interest. Several traffic prediction and evaluation protocols have been proposed in the literature using historical, visual and wireless connecting technologies to gather the real-time basic traffic data. Accuracy, delay, bandwidth consumption and high cost required equipments are the main challenges of the previous protocols. In this paper, we aim to propose a real-time traffic distribution prediction protocol (TDPP) using the vehicular network technology. The proposed protocol aims to produce accurate traffic evaluation and distribution of the investigated area of interest based on gathering the basic traffic data of some traveling vehicles there. From the experimental results we can infer that the TDPP protocol provides more accurate traffic evaluation in the case that only a few vehicles are equipped with wireless transceivers. Moreover, it requires less bandwidth and time to evaluate the traffic characteristics compared to traditional protocols in this field, since it only processes the basic traffic data of the small selected set of vehicles there.

Keywords: TDPP, Accuracy, delay, bandwidth consumption and high cost

Research Title: Traffic Efficiency Applications over Downtown Roads: A New Challenge for Intelligent Connected Vehicles

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2020

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 53

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Vehicular network technology is frequently used to provide several services and applications for drivers on road networks. The proposed applications in the environment of road networks are classified into three main categories based on their functions: safety, traffic efficiency, and entertainment. The traffic efficiency services are designed to enhance the moving fluency and smoothness of traveling vehicles over the road network. The grid layout architecture of the downtown areas provides several routes toward any targeted destination. Moreover, since several conflicted traffic flows compete at the road intersections, many vehicles have to stop and wait for safe situations to pass the road intersection without coming into conflict with other vehicles. The traffic efficiency applications in this scenario are designed to select the most efficient path for vehicles traveling toward their targeted destination/destinations. Moreover, other applications aimed to decrease the queuing delay time for vehicles at road intersections. In this article, we review several recently proposed mechanisms that worked to enhance the fluency of traffic over downtown road networks and point to the expected future trends in this field.

Keywords: Traffic efficiency, downtowns, VANETs

Research Title: An Efficient Freeway Driving Assistance Protocol in Vehicular Networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Waikoloa, HI, USA, USA

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Freeways have been known over decades as high-speed multi-lane roads, where the opposite traffic directions are completely separated. No intersections, pedestrians, or bicycles are expected on these road scenarios, besides specific ramps are designed to facilitate the entrance and exit of vehicles. Although freeway driving is considered safer and faster for experienced drivers, it can be more demanding and difficult for fresh or exhausted ones. Entering and existing the freeway road are considered the most critical situations where the driver needs to achieve high synchronizations with the surrounding traffic there. In this work, we introduce a freeway driving assistance protocol for drivers aiming to reduce the difficulties for fresh drivers and enhance the safety and efficiency conditions over the freeway road scenarios. This proposed protocol can also be used by the autonomous vehicles where no drivers control the vehicle. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol using several simulated driving scenarios. It shows a good performance in terms of increasing the safety of traffic and smoothing the traffic speed of vehicles.

Keywords: Traffic control , Roads , Protocols , Vehicles , Acceleration , Safety

Research Title: Secure Traffic Efficiency Control Protocol for Downtown Vehicular Networks.

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

IJ Network Security, 21

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: The intelligent transport system increasingly considers the traffic efficiency applications over the road networks. This type of application aims mainly at reducing the traveling time of each vehicle toward its targeted destination/destinations and deceasing the fuel consumption and the gas emissions there. The Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) technology is one of the main approaches that have been used in these applications. However, the connecting environment of VANETs introduces a good chance for malicious drivers to take advantages of other cooperative drivers and deceive them to achieve their own benefits. This paper introduces a Secure Traffic Efficiency control Protocol (STEP). The designed protocol means to secure the traffic efficiency control applications over the downtown areas. It protects the privacy of cooperative drivers and minimizes any damage that malicious drivers may cause. From the experimental results, the STEP protocol succeeds to detect malicious nodes over the road network. Thus, it enhances the correctness of the traffic efficiency applications and increases their feasibility.

Keywords: Relay Network congestion Malware Cryptography Group signature Secure communication Authentication Correctness (computer science)

Research Title: An efficient multi‐destinations trip planning protocol for intelligent transport system

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

International Journal of Numerical Modelling: Electronic Networks, Devices and Fields, 32

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Targeting several destinations on the same trip is commonly seen over the downtown areas. Several drivers leave their home or work everyday targeting multiple end‐destinations for shopping or entertaining purposes. The sequence of visiting destinations can be selected randomly by the drivers, especially if they are less familiar with the area of interest or with multi‐destinations trips. However, expert drivers that travel more frequently towards several destinations should be more cautious planning their trips. They consider the relative locations of these end‐destinations and use their historical knowledge regarding the traffic over the connected road segments there. This paper proposes an efficient multi‐destinations trip planning protocol (MDPP) that recommends drivers with the best sequence of destinations to visit. The proposed protocol considers the location of each destination and the relative distance between all located destinations. It also considers the traffic distribution over the investigated areas of interest to recommend drivers to avoid highly congested road segments or road segments that suffer traffic issue such as accident or emergency existence. From the experimental results, we can see that the MDPP protocol has selected the best path towards the targeted destinations compared with other common selected sequences. It has decreased the travel time, fuel consumption, and the gas emissions for different investigated scenarios.

Keywords: downtown, multi‐destinations, MDPP, VANETs, road efficiency, trip planner

Research Title: Safety and efficiency control protocol for highways using intelligent vehicular networks

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2019

Computer Networks, 152

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Several emergency cases negatively affect the traffic safety and efficiency over highway roads. Un-expected areas of traffic congestion are usually caused by the occurrence of an accident, existence of a damaged vehicle, or the appearance of an emergency vehicle. These scenarios have safety considerations regarding the involved vehicles in the event of emergency. However, the effect of these cases on surrounding vehicles is usually restricted to the parameters of traffic fluency and efficiency. However, in extreme scenarios, nearby vehicles may become involved in the emergency, such as in a chained accident. In this paper, we first aim to investigate the possible emergency cases over the highway roads. Secondly, we study the effects of these cases on the surrounding traveling vehicles, based on the relative location of each vehicle from the detected case, and the speed and moving direction of each vehicle. Third, we introduce a recommendation protocol that provides the most appropriate response to each vehicle in the vicinity of the detected emergency case. Reducing/increasing the vehicle’s speed, changing the traveling lane, and completely stopping the vehicle are the most popular responses in these scenarios. From the experimental results, we can see that the proposed protocol has increased the traffic fluency in the vicinity of the emergency cases over highways. It decreases the delay in vehicles’ traveling time and increases the throughput of each lane compared to the typical highway protocol. Moreover, it has increased the safety conditions for vehicles and decreased the percentage of vehicles to become involved in accidents.

Keywords: Accident detectionEmergency vehicleEmergency responseHighway road scenario

Research Title: An efficient dynamic traffic light scheduling algorithm considering emergency vehicles for intelligent transportation systems

Author: Maram Bani Younes, Published Year: 2018

Wireless Networks, 27

Faculty: Information Technology

Abstract: Traffic lights have been installed throughout road networks to control competing traffic flows at road intersections. These traffic lights are primarily intended to enhance vehicle safety while crossing road intersections, by scheduling conflicting traffic flows. However, traffic lights decrease vehicles’ efficiency over road networks. This reduction occurs because vehicles must wait for the green phase of the traffic light to pass through the intersection. The reduction in traffic efficiency becomes more severe in the presence of emergency vehicles. Emergency vehicles always take priority over all other vehicles when proceeding through any signalized road intersection, even during the red phase of the traffic light. Inexperienced or careless drivers may cause an accident if they take inappropriate action during these scenarios. In this paper, we aim to design a dynamic and efficient traffic light scheduling algorithm that adjusts the best green phase time of each traffic flow, based on the real-time traffic distribution around the signalized road intersection. This proposed algorithm has also considered the presence of emergency vehicles, allowing them to pass through the signalized intersection as soon as possible. The phases of each traffic light are set to allow any emergency vehicle approaching the signalized intersection to pass smoothly. Furthermore, scenarios in which multiple emergency vehicles approach the signalized intersection have been investigated to select the most efficient and suitable schedule. Finally, an extensive set of experiments have been utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Road network, Vehicular network, Emergency vehicle, Traffic light phases, Traffic light scheduling