Smart cities provide ease in lifestyle to their community members with the help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It provides better water, waste and energy management, enhances the security and safety of its citizens and offers better health facilities. Most of these applications are based on IoT-based sensor networks, that are deployed in different areas of applications according to their demand. Due to limited processing capabilities, sensor nodes cannot process multiple tasks simultaneously and need to offload some of their tasks to remotely placed cloud servers, which may cause delays. To reduce the delay, computing nodes are placed in different vicinitys acting as fog-computing nodes are used, to execute the offloaded tasks. It has been observed that the offloaded tasks are not uniformly received by fog computing nodes and some fog nodes may receive more tasks as some may receive less number of tasks. This may cause an increase in overall task execution time. Furthermore, these tasks comprise different priority levels and must be executed before their deadline. In this work, an Efficient Offloaded Task Execution for Fog enabled Smart cities (EOTE - FSC) is proposed. EOTE - FSC proposes a load balancing mechanism by modifying the greedy algorithm to efficiently distribute the offloaded tasks to its attached fog nodes to reduce the overall task execution time. This results in the successful execution of most of the tasks within their deadline. In addition, EOTE - FSC modifies the task sequencing with a deadline algorithm for the fog node to optimally execute the offloaded tasks in such a way that most of the high-priority tasks are entertained. The load balancing results of EOTE - FSC are compared with state-of-the-art well-known Round Robin, Greedy, Round Robin with longest job first, and Round Robin with shortest job first algorithms. However, fog computing results of EOTE - FSC are compared with the First Come First Serve algorithm. The results show that the EOTE - FSC effectively offloaded the tasks on fog nodes and the maximum load on the fog computing nodes is reduced up to 29%, 27.3%, 23%, and 24.4% as compared to Round Robin, Greedy, Round Robin with LJF and Round Robin with SJF algorithms respectively. However, task execution in the proposed EOTE - FSC executes a maximum number of offloaded high-priority tasks as compared to the FCFS algorithm within the same computing capacity of fog nodes.
Algorithms , Communication , Cities , Health Facilities , Information Science
Traffic congestion is one of the major challenges faced by daily commuters in smart cities. An autonomous transportation system with a 5 G-based Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) communication system is the solution to meet the traffic challenges faced in smart cities. Vehicular networks provide wireless connectivity to enable a large number of connected vehicle applications. Vehicular networks allow vehicles to share their emergency and infotainment traffic by following vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or by using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. The infrastructure of vehicular networks mainly comprises multiple Road Side Units (RSUs). Fog computing nodes are placed adjacent to these RSUs to provide quick access to vehicles. For infotainment traffic, vehicles intend to download their required content from the content provider. Caching the same contents from the nearby fog computing node significantly reduces delay with improved quality of service. As there are millions of contents with varying sizes, caching all demanded contents on these fog nodes is not possible due to their limited caching capacity. In this work, we propose an improved content caching scheme for fog nodes to satisfy vehicles and content providers for fair content placement. The proposed algorithm is based on a modified Gale-Shapley technique that considers factors such as content popularity, vehicle connectivity, and quality of the communication channel to optimize the content caching process. Simulation results show that the proposed technique caches a higher number of popular contents with lower downloading time.
Background: Hearing impairment (HI) is the most common global disabling condition. It is a considerable public health condition in childhood that is associated with long-term socio-emotional-academic, and communication difficulties. The current study explored the knowledge and awareness of HI among school-age children and its related factor in Taif, Saudi Arabia. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was done on 268 Saudi school-age children in the population of the Taif region of Saudi Arabia. A predesigned questionnaire was used to collect their demographic data, consanguinity, education level, and academic performance. Results: About 45.9% of parents had good awareness related to hearing loss and its impact on children's life. Only 19% (n = 51) of parents reported that their children encountered language problems in communicating with others. When we assessed the relationship between this language problem and academic performance, it was found that children with language problems had below-average academic performance (P < 0.001). Conclusion: The study showed that parents' awareness about children's hearing was not that satisfactory, and there was a considerable amount of difficulties faced by the children in their personal and social life due to these hearing problems. It is imperative to create awareness among the public regarding various modifiable risk factors of HI by conducting health awareness campaigns.
Background: Aesthetic procedures are considered one of the most commonly performed procedures in the medical field. Social media (SM) reflects the electronic platforms that deliver an enormous amount of information to different users and enable them to share their content and experience with others at the simple click of a button. In our modern era, SM platforms affect different angles of our lives, from a simple detail to a significant complex aspect. Objectives: To evaluate the effect of different SM platforms on plastic cosmetic surgery in Saudi Arabia. Methods: The authors conducted a cross-sectional study in 2021, employing a random sampling technique with a sample size of 2249 participants (ages 12 to >50). They included all plastic cosmetic interventions, and excluded reconstructive and traumatic interventions. Results: It was reported that 56.7% were not interested in doing surgical or non-surgical cosmetic interventions, while 43.3% were interested. Those influenced by SM platforms were either interested or not interested in doing cosmetic interventions. Snapchat (Santa Monica, CA) was the most commonly influential SM platform. In addition, 35.9% answered that surgeons' advertisements affected their decision to seek plastic surgery consultations. Photograph editing applications made 46% of participants look better and more confident to post and share their pictures. Conclusions: Our analysis showed that those influenced by SM platforms to seek cosmetic treatment were comparatively more interested in cosmetic treatment, with Snapchat being the most influential platform. Therefore, further studies to evaluate the impact of SM platforms among plastic surgeons are encouraged.
Background and Aim: Renal stones are the most common urological disorder resulting in different marked morbidities with different risk factors. This study aimed to assess the perceptions of the general population regarding dietary factors in promoting and preventing nephrolithiasis in the Taif region. Methods: We carried out this cross-sectional study during a period of 4 months. All Taif city population who were ≥18 years old were included in the study regardless of their gender and history of urolithiasis. Participants were excluded if they were <18 years of age, not Taif city residents, and whose primary language was not Arabic. Data were analyzed using SPSS ver. 23. Results: It was found that 68.4% of the participants had poor knowledge of dietary risk factors. Further, 86.4% of the participants thought that their diet could affect the risk of kidney stone formation, and 88.6% believed that water can decrease the risk of kidney stone formation. In addition, 54.5% and 66.3% knew that increased consumption of meat and smoking can increase the risk of kidney stone formation. Conclusion: The knowledge regarding specific dietary risk factors promoting and preventing kidney stones formation was poor among the Taif city population.
The relative importance of amount and frequency of sugars intake for caries development has been a matter of debate in recent years, yet only one study has formally evaluated this question among adults. The aims of this study were to explore the shape of the relationship between amount and frequency of added sugars intake and their associations with dental caries among adults. Cross-sectional data from 10,514 adults, aged 20+ years, from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2011-2016 were analyzed. The amount (g/day) and frequency (items/day and episodes/day) of added sugars intake were derived from dietary recalls. Dental caries was indicated by the DMFS and DS scores. Fractional polynomials were used to characterize the relationship between amount and frequency of added sugars intake. Their associations with DMFS and DS were evaluated in negative binomial regression models adjusting for confounders. There was a logarithmic relationship between amount and frequency of added sugars intake. The amount of added sugars intake was positively associated with the DMFS (rate ratio: 1.11, 95% CI: 1.07-1.15) and DS scores (1.43, 95% CI: 1.33-1.54). However, the estimates for frequency of added sugars intake varied depending on how it was expressed. When expressed in items/day, it was not associated with the DMFS (1.02, 95% CI: 0.99-1.04) or DS score (0.91, 95% CI: 0.81-1.02). When expressed in episodes/day, it was positively associated with the DMFS (1.43, 95% CI: 1.33-1.54) but not with the DS score (0.95, 95% CI: 0.86-1.04). This study found a curvilinear relationship between the amount and frequency of added sugars intake. Furthermore, the amount of added sugars intake was more consistently and strongly associated with dental caries than the frequency of intake.
Dental Caries , Adult , Cross-Sectional Studies , Dental Caries/epidemiology , Diet , Humans , Nutrition Surveys , Sugars , United States/epidemiology
