Objective:To determine adherence to methotrexate (MTX) therapy in patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and to identify factors that promote either adherence or non adherence.Methods:One hundred Rheumatoid Arthritis patients on MTX for at least two months were enrolled. Questionnaire was completed by direct interview. Details recorded were, demographics (age, sex, education, monthly income), disease duration, duration on MTX and current dose. Disease Activity Score on 28 joint counts (DAS 28) at the current visit, concomitant drugs taken and number of doses of MTX missed in the previous 8 weeks were noted. Non adherence was defined as omission of any three or more prescribed doses of MTX in previous 8 week. Patients were asked for the factors that motivated their adherence to MTX as well as factors for non adherence. Presence of side effects due to MTX was also recorded.Result:Non adherence was found among 23% of cases. Patients of low socioeconomic group (p <0.0001) and on MTX for longer duration (p <0.001) had higher non adherence. Non adherent patients had significantly higher disease activity as measured by DAS 28 (p<0.001). Good counseling and education by the doctor was a strong predictor of adherence (p <0.001). Lack of affordability (p <0.001); lack of availability at local pharmacy (p <0.001); lack of family support (p <0.001) and lack of awareness regarding need and importance of MTX (p < 0.001were found as significant factors for non adherence.Conclusion:MTX non adherence in RA is noted in about one fourth of study group. Various economical and social issues lead to non adherence but good patient education and counseling by doctor could promote adherence in this study group.

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Face verification has been widely studied during the past two decades. One of the challenges is the rising concern about the security and privacy of the template database. In this paper, we propose a secure face verification system which generates a unique secure cryptographic key from a face template. The face images are processed to produce face templates or codes to be utilized for the encryption and decryption tasks. The result identity data is encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Distance metric naming hamming distance and Euclidean distance are used for template matching identification process, where template matching is a process used in pattern recognition. The proposed system is tested on the ORL, YALEs, and PKNU face databases, which contain 360, 135, and 54 training images respectively. We employ Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to determine the most discriminating features among face images. The experimental results showed that the proposed distance measure was one the promising best measures with respect to different characteristics of the biometric systems. Using the proposed method we needed to extract fewer images in order to achieve 100% cumulative recognition than using any other tested distance measure.

Moving ship detection and tracking is the key technology in the intelligence coastal surveillance system. In this paper we present an adaptive and improved method to accurately detect and monitor ships within the area of interest. It is an advanced version of the previous works done regarding moving ship detection and tracking. The proposed tracking scheme is based on the characteristics of both sea and ship, which include: background information and local position of the ship. We used Morphological "open" operation and frame-subtraction method for background subtraction. The ships are located using the edge information along morphological "thicken", "dilate" and "bridge" operations. The experimental results demonstrate robust and real-time ship detection and tracking over thousands of image frames, and robustness against cluttered background. The detection rate achieved was 98.4%.

Many special needs children suffer from a common characteristics impairment which appear as disability to interpret social cues, fail to use joint-attention tasks as well as a failure in social gaze when communicating.  This what makes them different than the normal children. The results of this difficulty are the special needs children often get frustrated when they are unable to expressively share their feeling and socially interact with the community. This research is investigating the problems faced by autistic, down syndrome and slow learner children to respond and communicate appropriately with the people around them and to propose an efficient approach to improve their social interaction.  Malaysian education policy is to integrate students with learning difficulties or special educational needs.  Thus, the development of a robotic approach using LEGO Mindstorms EV3 to aid the teaching and learning of special needs children especially autism in in Malaysia in introduced in this paper.  Robotic approach in special education provides changes, inclusive and sustainable development of the disabled community towards supporting Industrial Revolution 4.0.