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In the area of imitation learning, one of the important research problems is action representation. There has been a growing interest in expressing actions as a combination of meaningful subparts called action primitives. Action primitives could be thought of as elementary building blocks for action representation. In this article, we present a complete concept of learning action primitives to rec
The representation of human movements for recognition and synthesis is important in many application fields such as: surveillance, human-computer interaction, motion capture, and humanoid robots. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are a common statistical framework in this context, since they are generative and are able to deal with the intrinsic dynamic variation of movements performed by humans. In thi
This work compares iterative 2D-3D Pose Estimation methods for use in real-time applications. The compared methods are available for public as C++ code. One method is part of the openCV library, namely POSIT. Because POSIT is not applicable for planar 3D-point configurations, we include the planar POSIT version. The second method optimizes the pose parameters directly by solving a Non-linear Least
In humanoid robotics, the recognition and synthesis of parametric movements plays an extraordinary role for robot human interaction. Such a parametric movement is a movement of a particular type (semantic), for example, similar pointing movements performed at different table-top positions. For understanding the whole meaning of a movement of a human, the recognition of its type, likewise its param
Background: Internet addiction is one of the fast-growing addictive behaviors and is a significant public health problem affecting a large number of people worldwide. Excessive use of the internet among university students increases their risk of internet addiction and related negative consequences. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and factors associated with internet addiction among m
Modern contraceptive use provides opportunities for women and couples to achieve optimal child spacing, achieve desired family size and reduce unsafe abortions. Despite these facts, modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR) in Tanzania remains as low as 32%. This study aimed to determine trends and factors associated with changes in modern contraceptive use among women of reproductive age in Tan
Background More than five million perinatal deaths occur each year globally. Despite efforts put forward during the millennium development goals era, perinatal deaths continue to increase relative to under-five deaths, especially in low- A nd middle-income countries. This study aimed to determine predictors of perinatal death in the presence of missing data using birth registry data from Kilimanja
Background: Mental distress is a major public health problem which includes anxiety, depression and somatic symptoms such as sleeping problems, fatigue and headache. University students are consistently reported to have higher levels of mental distress compared to the general population. Although university students with mental distress have significantly impaired cognitive functioning, learning d
Background Low birth weight (LBW) is an important indicator of newborn survival. It is associated with higher risk of morbidity, mortality and long-term health consequences. Little has been done on incidence and recurrence risk of LBW in developing countries including Tanzania. This study aimed to determine the incidence and recurrence risk of LBW among women who delivered at Kilimanjaro Christian
Background Blood is a critical aspect of treatment in life saving situations, increasing demand. Blood requisition practices greatly effect sufficient supply in blood banks. This study aimed to determine the risk factors for inappropriate blood requisition in Tanzania. Methods This was a cross sectional study using secondary data of 14,460 patients’ blood requests from 42 transfusion hospitals. Pr
Background: Hypertension is a public health problem, and yet few people are aware of it and even fewer access effective treatment. With the ongoing demographic transition in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, people are changing from rural, manual work to urban lifestyles, hence the risk of hypertension increases. Objective: This study aimed at determining the prevalence, awareness and risk factors
Background: Insufficient physical activity (PA) is a major contributing factor in the growing problem of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in urban and rural Sub-Saharan Africa. This study aimed to determine PA and associated factors among adults in Northern Tanzania. Methods: We analyzed secondary data from a cross-sectional serological survey nested within the Magu health and demographic sentinel
Introduction: Fever in malaria endemic areas, has been shown to strongly predict malaria infection and is a key symptom influencing malaria treatment. WHO recommended confirmation testing for Plasmodium spp. before initiation of antimalarials due to increased evidence of the decrease of morbidity and mortality from malaria, decreased malaria associated fever, and increased evidence of high prevale
Background: Hepatitis B virus infection is a global health problem with the highest prevalence in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of infected people, including healthcare workers are unaware of their status. This study is aimed to determining seroprevalence of hepatitis B virus infection and associated factors among healthcare workers in northern Tanzania. Methods: This cross-sectio
In this article, we investigate public support for eco-social policies combining goals of social justice and ecological sustainability. Eco-social policies contribute both to providing a social floor or redistributing resources to where they are needed and to respecting an ecological ceiling by keeping human activities within ecological limits. We discuss five such policies and highlight arguments
This paper presents simulations of the radar cross section for a marine corner reflector affected by icing as it is illuminated by 3 GHz marine radar. This is compared to the radar cross section for an unaffected reflector, and the consequences for radar range are investigated. To perform the simulations, a finite element-boundary integral hybrid method is used. The simulation code is based on sev
Torrential rainfall predisposes hills to catastrophic landslides resulting in serious damage to life and property. Landslide inventory maps are therefore essential for rapid response and developing disaster mitigation strategies. Manual mapping techniques are laborious and time-consuming, and thus not ideal in rapid response situations. Automated landslide mapping from optical satellite imagery us
Recent Advances: Various studies have suggested that mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNA-CN), a surrogate biomarker of mitochondrial dysfunction, is an easily quantifiable biomarker for chronic diseases, including diabetes and cancer. However, current knowledge is limited, and the results are controversial. This has been attributed mainly to methodology and study design.Critical Issues: The incid
