Faculty of Engineering
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The Faculty of Engineering at Stellenbosch University is one of South Africa's major producers of top quality engineers. Established in 1944, it currently has five Engineering Departments.
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Browsing Faculty of Engineering by browse.metadata.type "Chapters in Books"
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- ItemClinical-pull approach to telemedicine implementation policies using health informatics in the developing world(IGI Global, 2012-04) Treurnicht, Maria J.; Van Dyk, LiezlENGLISH ABSTRACT: Telemedicine could effectively aid hospital referral systems in bringing specialized care to rural communities. South Africa has identified telemedicine as part of its primary health care strategic plan, but similar to many other developing countries, the successful implementation of telemedicine programs is a daunting challenge. One of the contributing factors is the insufficient evidence that telemedicine is a cost-effective alternative. Furthermore, many telemedicine services are implemented without a thorough needs assessment. Throughout this chapter, the authors investigate the use of medical informatics in quantitative telemedicine needs assessments. A framework is introduced to direct implementation policies towards a proven clinical need rather than pushing technology into practise. This clinical-pull strategy aims to reduce the amount of failed projects, by providing decision support to implement appropriate technologies that have the potential to contribute towards better quality healthcare.
- ItemReview of optimization techniques(John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2010) Venter, G.A basic overview of optimization techniques is provided. The standard form of the general nonlinear, constrained optimization problem is presented, and various techniques for solving the resulting optimization problem are discussed. The techniques are classified as either local (typically gradient-based) or global (typically non-gradient based or evolutionary) algorithms. A great many optimization techniques exist and it is not possible to provide a complete review in the limited space available here. Instead, an effort is made to concentrate on techniques that are commonly used in engineering optimization applications. The review is kept general in nature, without considering special cases like linear programming, convex problems, multi-objective optimization, multi-disciplinary optimization, etc. The advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques are highlighted, and suggestions are made to aid the designer in selecting an appropriate technique for a specific problem at hand. Where possible, a short overview of a representative method is presented to aid the discussion of that particular class of algorithms.