Adeyemi College of Education

Abstract: Periwinkle shell, an abundant and inexpensive natural resource, was used to prepare activated carbon by physicochemical activation with potassium hydroxide (KOH) and carbon dioxide (CO2) as the activating agents at 850 °C for 2 h. The adsorption equilibrium and kinetics of methylene blue dye on such carbon were then examined at 25 °C. Adsorption isotherm of the methylene blue (MB) on the activated carbon was determined and correlated with common isotherm equations. The equilibrium data for methylene blue adsorption well fitted to the Langmuir equation, with maximum monolayer adsorption capacity of 500.00 mg/g. Two simplified kinetic models including pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order equation were selected to follow the adsorption processes. The adsorption of methylene blue on activated carbon derived from periwinkle shell could best be described by the pseudo-second-order equation. The kinetic parameters of this best-fit model were calculated and discussed.

Abstract: We studied prospectively the effect of antenatal care on the obstetric performance of teenagers seen at a university teaching hospital over a 14-month period. When the obstetric complications among the teenagers were compared to their older counterpart, there were significantly higher complication rates, especially anaemia, preterm delivery, low birth weight and neonatal admission.After controlling for utilisation of antenatal care, significant differences were observed only in the incidence of low birth weight babies. In conclusion, this study has shown that the poor obstetric outcome of teenage pregnancy is related to non-utilisation of prenatal care rather than their biological age.

Abstract: The healthcare system consists of large volumes of data which are usually generated from diverse sources such as physicians' case notes, hospital admission notes, discharge summaries, pharmacies, insurance companies, medical imaging, laboratories, sensor based devices, genomics, social media as well as articles in medical journals. Healthcare data are however very complex and difficult to manage. This is as a result of the astronomical growth of healthcare data, the high speed at which these data are generated as well as the diversity of data types in healthcare. The capturing, storage, analysis and retrieval of health related data are rapidly shifting from paper based system towards digitization. However, the vast volume as well as the complexity of these data makes it difficult for the data to be processed and analyzed by traditional approaches and techniques. Consequently, technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization are now gradually used for processing massive data effectively and securely in healthcare. Hence, the healthcare system is swiftly becoming a big data industry. Thus, this paper examines the concept of big data in healthcare, its benefits and attendant challenges. This paper revealed that the fragmentation of healthcare data, ethical issues, usability issues as well as security and privacy issues are some of the factors impeding the successful implementation of big data in healthcare. This paper therefore suggests that ensuring security and privacy of healthcare data, the adoption of a standardized healthcare terminology, education strategy and the design of usable systems for processing large volumes of data are some of the ways of successfully implementing big data in healthcare.