Gloria Iyawa - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Gloria Iyawa

Stress-induced conditions constitute some of the major health challenges experienced by individua... more Stress-induced conditions constitute some of the major health challenges experienced by individuals. Persuasive technologies have the potential to improve health behaviour as shown in the literature. Despite the availability of mHealth applications for stress management, there is a dearth of studies on the use of persuasive strategies in mHealth applications for stress management among university students. There is a need to investigate persuasive strategies that will facilitate university students to use mHealth applications to initiate health behavioral change. This study aims to develop the persuasive strategies that will facilitate the use of mHealth application for stress management among university students in Namibia using the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) as a case study. This study will apply Design Science Research methodology and a case study approach to evaluate and validate the identified persuasive strategies to support the use mHealth application...

Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 2016

Software methodologies provide guidelines for the development of software applications. Studies r... more Software methodologies provide guidelines for the development of software applications. Studies reveal that customer interaction in the software development process improves the chances that software applications will meet customers' needs. Despite a number of software methodologies introduced and a comparison of these methodologies, there is a dearth of studies that empirically investigate customer interaction between these software methodologies within the Namibian context. The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in customer interaction between software methodologies deployed in Namibian software firms. The study adopted a qualitative, case study approach. Data was collected through standardized, open-ended interviews. The findings show that the methodologies deployed in Namibian software firms include the waterfall model, Scrum, iterative model, eXtreme Programming (XP), and rapid application development (RAD). The findings also reveal that although there was in-depth customer interaction in Scrum, the iterative model, XP and RAD, customer interaction in the software development process could also be challenging. The findings provide useful insights in software methodologies deployed in Namibian software firms and the experience within the Namibian context. An implication for software project managers and software developers is that customer interaction should be properly managed to ensure that the software methodologies for improving software development processes are effectively deployed.

IST Africa, 2019

Mobile devices have undergone transformation from being used as a channel of communication to too... more Mobile devices have undergone transformation from being used as a channel of communication to tools for teaching and learning. This study ascertained how mobile learning technology can enable quality education in Namibia. It assessed teachers' perception and the usage pattern of mobile technology in three regions of Namibia (Erongo, Khomas and Otjozondjupa regions). 72 teachers were carefully selected from nine (9) high schools in the 3 regions. Data collected through a questionnaire was analysed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). The findings revealed that teachers are already using mobile devices for academic purposes. It also revealed that majority of the teachers use mobile devices for educational purposes and teachers are of the belief that mobile devices can enhance quality education.

IST Africa, 2019

The purpose of this paper was to define mobile health (mHealth) for maternal healthcare in the co... more The purpose of this paper was to define mobile health (mHealth) for maternal healthcare in the context of developing countries. This paper also aimed to identify and classify different mHealth apps and services used for maternal healthcare in developing countries by means of a Literature Survey. This paper is part of a larger study which aims to develop guidelines and strategies for implementing mHealth apps and services to support maternal healthcare in public hospitals in Namibia. Studies have revealed that mHealth apps and services have been useful tools in facilitating patient engagement in the healthcare process. This paper contributes to the understanding of existing apps and services which have been adopted for maternal healthcare in developing countries and provides useful insights on the research gaps to support the development of guidelines and strategies for implementing mHealth apps and services for maternal healthcare in public hospitals in Namibia. Twenty papers on mHealth apps and services met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The findings suggest that short message service and mobile apps have been popular for supporting pregnant and postpartum women in developing countries. Research gaps were identified and recommendations were provided for the Namibian public health sector. The findings of this paper could inform researchers as well as health policymakers within the Namibian public health sector on services which could improve maternal healthcare services in Namibia.

IST Africa, 2019

There is a huge dropout rate among Computer Science students at the University of Namibia (UNAM).... more There is a huge dropout rate among Computer Science students at the University of Namibia (UNAM). This can be attributed to the lack of engaging methods for learning both basic and advanced computational concepts. Despite gamification concepts in learning discussed in the literature, no study addresses the modules with very high failure rates among Computer Science students at UNAM using the concept of gamification. The purpose of this paper was to present the design, development, and evaluation of CS Challenger. CS Challenger is a mobile application which was developed to motivate students through interactive gaming techniques to facilitate rewards and rankings. For the first time in the Namibian context, a contextualised mobile app was developed to gamify the concepts of five modules offered to Computer Science students at UNAM. The results from the evaluation suggest that CS Challenger provides a motivating environment in which students can quickly grasp the concept of a subject. The findings of the study are expected to inform managers in education in Namibia on alternative means of providing gamified learning content to students.

Procedia Computer Science, 2016

This paper reviews existing literature on digital health innovation ecosystems. It aims to explor... more This paper reviews existing literature on digital health innovation ecosystems. It aims to explore the terms digital health, innovation and digital ecosystems to identify components towards presenting a conceptual framework for a digital health innovation ecosystem as part of a larger study. A systematic literature review was conducted on four academic databases: ACM, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore and SpringerLink. Due to the dearth in initial search results, the search was broadened to include non-academic publications and practitioner case reports. The study identified components of digital health, components of innovation relevant to the healthcare domain and components of digital ecosystems. It further suggests, within the context, a comprehensive definition of digital health innovation ecosystems. A conceptual framework for digital health innovation ecosystems is proposed. The findings from this study could conceivably be a step towards enabling a common understanding of practitioners, professionals and academics within the digital health domain as well as a basis for further studies on digital health innovation ecosystems.

Data & Knowledge Engineering, Jan 1, 2001

The vast amount of heterogeneous information sources available on the Internet demands advanced s... more The vast amount of heterogeneous information sources available on the Internet demands advanced solutions for acquiring, mediating, and maintaining relevant information for the common user. Intelligent information agents are autonomous computational software entities that are especially meant to (1) provide pro-active resource discovery, (2) resolve information impedance of information consumers and providers, and (3) offer value-added information services and products. These agents are supposed to cope with the difficulties associated with the information overload of the user, preferably just in time.Based on a systematic classification of intelligent information agents, this paper presents an overview of the basic key enabling technologies needed to build such agents, and respective examples of information agent systems currently deployed on the Internet.

Current mechanisms for authenticating communication between devices that share no prior context a... more Current mechanisms for authenticating communication between devices that share no prior context are inconvenient for ordinary users, without the assistance of a trusted authority. We present and analyze seeing-is-believing, a system that utilizes 2D barcodes and camera-telephones to implement a visual channel for authentication and demonstrative identification of devices. We apply this visual channel to several problems in computer security, including authenticated key exchange between devices that share no prior context, establishment of a trusted path for configuration of a TCG-compliant computing platform, and secure device configuration in the context of a smart home.

Developing middleware services for dynamic distributed systems, e.g., ad-hoc networks, is a chall... more Developing middleware services for dynamic distributed systems, e.g., ad-hoc networks, is a challenging task given that such services deal with dynamically changing membership and asynchronous communication. Algorithms developed for static settings are often not usable in such settings because they rely on (logical) all-to-all node connectivity through routing protocols, which may be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive to implement in highly dynamic settings. This paper explores the indirect learning, via periodic gossip, approach to information dissemination within a dynamic, distributed data service implementing atomic read/write memory service. The indirect learning scheme is used to improve the liveness of the service in the settings with uncertain connectivity. The service is formally proved to guarantee atomicity in all executions. Conditional performance analysis of the new service is presented, where this analysis has the potential of being generalized to other similar dynamic algorithms. Under the assumption that the network is connected, and assuming reasonable timing conditions, the bounds on the duration of read/write operations of the new service are calculated. Finally, the paper proposes a deployment strategy where indirect learning leads to an improvement in communication costs relative to a previous solution that assumes all-to-all connectivity.

We explore the effect of dimensionality on the “nearest neighbor” problem. We show that under a b... more We explore the effect of dimensionality on the “nearest neighbor” problem. We show that under a broad set of conditions (much broader than independent and identically distributed dimensions), as dimensionality increases, the distance to the nearest data point approaches the distance to the farthest data point. To provide a practical perspective, we present empirical results on both real and synthetic data sets that demonstrate that this effect can occur for as few as 10–15 dimensions. These results should not be interpreted to mean that high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful; we illustrate this point by identifying some high-dimensional workloads for which this effect does not occur. However, our results do emphasize that the methodology used almost universally in the database literature to evaluate high-dimensional indexing techniques is flawed, and should be modified. In particular, most such techniques proposed in the literature are not evaluated versus simple linear scan, and are evaluated over workloads for which nearest neighbor is not meaningful. Often, even the reported experiments, when analyzed carefully, show that linear scan would outperform the techniques being proposed on the workloads studied in high (10–15) dimensionality!

Sensor networks are being widely deployed for measurement, detection and surveillance application... more Sensor networks are being widely deployed for measurement, detection and surveillance applications. In these new applications, users issue long-running queries over a combination of stored data and sensor data. Most existing applications rely on a centralized system for collecting sensor data. These systems lack flexibility because data is extracted in a predefined way; also, they do not scale to a large number of devices because large volumes of raw data are transferred regardless of the queries that are submitted. In our new concept of sensor database system, queries dictate which data is extracted from the sensors. In this paper, we define the concept of sensor databases mixing stored data represented as relations and sensor data represented as time series. Each long-running query formulated over a sensor database defines a persistent view, which is maintained during a given time interval. We also describe the design and implementation of the COUGAR sensor database system.

Conference Presentations by Gloria Iyawa

18th JOHANNESBURG International Conference on Education, Economics, Humanities & Social Sciences (EEHSS-20), 2020

Social media has impacted several areas of life and among them is communication and education. Th... more Social media has impacted several areas of life and among them is communication and education. Through social media, people reach out to loved ones in nearby and faraway places. As a communication tool, students and lecturers could leverage on it to interact among themselves. Such communications could affect student academic life and performance effect, hence, social media having an effect on student academic life. To investigate the perceived effect of social media on student academic life, this study applied the quantitative research design approach to collect data from 96 students in three universities in Namibia. The study found that social media can be used for academic purposes and thus far used to support student academic life to a very high extent. As a resu lt of this, students rated social media as a good platform. This is a wakeup call to stakeholders of education to understand that mobile devices and social media have come to stay and are widely used by students even for academic purposes.

Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 2016

IST Africa, 2019

Procedia Computer Science, 2016

Data & Knowledge Engineering, Jan 1, 2001

18th JOHANNESBURG International Conference on Education, Economics, Humanities & Social Sciences (EEHSS-20), 2020