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Blockchains have caught the attention of governments, businesses, and researchers due to their potential to revolutionize the way data is stored and consumed. Despite the current interest in blockchains globally, there has been unsatisfactory progress of this promising technology in developing countries, including Tanzania. One factor hindering the advancement of blockchain in the country is the lack of knowledge of the technology itself. Challenged by the situation, this study implemented a blockchain lab to provide a platform for users to explore and practice various concepts of blockchain. This online lab, called Dinari, was implemented using Ethereum blockchain and was hosted on a cloud server. Experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the developed lab. Results from the experiment show that the platform gives an average transaction processing time of 15.17 seconds. The processing times were within an acceptable range of performance when compared with other online platforms, such as Mainnet and Kovan that provide average processing times of between 8.8 seconds and 18.3 seconds. The study can be scaled up in future to deploy more use cases, including health, in addition to the existing payment use case.

Blockchain technology is one among the recent innovations in the computing industry. Blockchains have gathered a widespread interest in the industry mainly due to their security promise. Despite the anticipated benefits of Blockchains, there are several limitations which make the technology less suitable in large scale applications such as banking, one being low throughput. Several initiatives to improve the throughput of Blockchains are being tried out both in the academia and the business worlds but no systematic classification of the initiatives and the strategies used has been done. This study explores Blockchain performance improvement initiatives and classify the initiatives by the improvement strategy used. This study has found that, out of 365 articles on the area of Blockchain performance, 300 were solution proposals aimed at improving the performance of Blockchains. The most used strategies in these proposals were alternative to PoW, sharding and multi-chain architecture.

In visual tracking, most of the tracking methods suffer from abrupt motions. To address this problem, we propose a novel method for tracking abrupt motions using objectness embedded in smoothing stochastic sampling and improved Tree coherency approximate nearest neighbor. An improved coherence approximate nearest neighbor is utilized to estimate the promising regions as prior knowledge. Moreover, objectness is employed as an objectness proposal function for handling dynamic motions. Finally, both prior knowledge and objectness proposal are integrated into the smoothing stochastic approximate Monte Carlo to predict a new state of the target object. Experimental comparison with other tracking methods and proposed method was carried on some of the challenging video sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art tracking methods for dealing with abrupt motions in terms of effectiveness and robustness.

Visual tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision with extensive application domains in surveillance and intelligent systems. Recently, correlation filter-based tracking methods have shown a great achievement in terms of robustness, accuracy, and speed. However, such methods have a problem of dealing with fast motion (FM), motion blur (MB), illumination variation (IV), and drifting caused by occlusion (OCC). To solve this problem, a tracking method that integrates objectness-bounding box regression (O-BBR) model and a scheme based on kernelized correlation filter (KCF) is proposed. The scheme based on KCF is used to improve the tracking performance of FM and MB. For handling drift problem caused by OCC and IV, we propose objectness proposals trained in bounding box regression as prior knowledge to provide candidates and background suppression. Finally, scheme KCF as a base tracker and O-BBR are fused to obtain a state of a target object. Extensive experimental comparisons of the developed tracking method with other state-of-the-art trackers are performed on some of the challenging video sequences. Experimental comparison results show that our proposed tracking method outperforms other state-of-the-art tracking methods in terms of effectiveness, accuracy, and robustness.

Background: Access to health care services is a significant factor to health seeking practices that contributes to a healthy population. Improving health care accessibility is an important health priority in low-income countries. The objective of this study was to determine distribution of health care facilities and identify the high priority areas, which require more services in Mtwara, southern Tanzania.Methods: This study was carried in Mtwara Rural district of southern Tanzania and involved health care facilities. A hand held global positioning system was used to geo-reference the coordinates of all facilities. A questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions was used to gather information from patients who attended the respective facilities. Interviews with district health officials and facility in-charges were conducted.Results: There were 38 health in the district. Most of them were located within southern part of the district. The majority of facilities (97%) were government owned. On average each facility was serving 2,400 population. Malaria management, reproductive and child health services, family planning and integrated management of childhood illnesses were offered by all health facilities in the district. Prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV was offered by 34 (89.5%) facilities. Tuberculosis services were offered by only 3 facilities while voluntary counselling and testing of HIV and anti-retroviral treatment services were available in 15 and 10 health facilities, respectively. Only 4 facilities had laboratory and inpatients services. The majority of the staff included Medical Attendants (39%), Nurse Midwives (34%), and Clinical Officers (20%). Assistant Medical Officers and Nursing Officers each accounted for 2% of the total staff. There were no Medical Officers, laboratory technicians or pharmaceutical technicians in the district. A total of 408 health facility clients (≥18yrs) were interviewed. Factors influencing the choice of a health facility were the availability of special services, medicine and qualified human resources.Conclusion: The majority of facilities in Mtwara are government and there is disparity in the distribution of the facilities. Availability of medicines and qualified human resources were the major factors on the preference for accessing health care services.