Mental Health Disorders and Challenges faced by developing countries

Mental disorders are common and contribute to the highest burden of disease across the globe. Depression and anxiety has become the most frequent disorder in these times. However, it is notconsidered a disease mostly and there are no proper policies and treatment all over the world but thedeveloping countries are affected the most. Mental health care services are lacking and inaccessible tomost of the patients worldwide. Apart from this fact, the stigma associated with this ailment is a majorhindrance in the way of treatment. Lack of human resource and their proper training is also lacking. Thereis a dire need to enhance research capacity to actually estimate the burden and magnitude of the problem, preparing a policy and above all, its implementation to bring a change in the treatment of mental healthproblems. Low and middle income countries are suffering the most due to these disorders and ironicallyit is not considered a disease thereMostly, the uneducated people attribute such mental health issues to supernatural phenomenonsuch as ghosts or magic etc. Additionally, for the treatment of these so-called “supernatural phenomenon”and to get rid of ghosts, they tend to go to “peers” or “baba” who are illiterate people, pretending to havecure for these patients. But infact, such malpractices and misconceptions among masses lead to adisastrous situation. It causes worsening of the condition of patient by not getting the proper medical andpsychiatric treatment, secondly, they are caught up by wrong people who extort huge amount of money. These are the challenges that developing countries are facing for the treatment of mental health issues. Evidence-based interventions and practice by trained personals in community and primary health carefacilities can improve the understanding and treatment of these ailments. Exercise, healthy life style, healthy dietary+ patterns and physical activities may also work wonders in these conditions.

Design and Implementation of Energy Management System Using High Scale Scada

For energy deficit countries like Pakistan, an optimal energy management program is essential to make sure reliability in energy supply and discover energy saving opportunities by minimizing costs related to generation and transmission of energy. SCADA based management and supervision systems capitalize on the deployment of the on hand power management facility by interactive review of the electrical power network to check for system damages and outages. This thesis has contributed in low cost development and implementation of a Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) with provision of wireless connectivity with an aim to optimize the energy management system based on SCADA. This particular design of RTU is based on FPGA and its performance is better than commercially available RTUs based on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and it is also well comparable with other commercially available modern RTUs for power related applications. The characteristics and features of developed RTU have been verified by means of hardware testing. Moreover, a model for optimized energy management system was also proposed and demonstrated by means of simulations. The provision of wireless connectivity in the developed RTU has been optimized and benchmarking was also done for further verification. Initially, the modeling of the power system outages and the system adjustments using contingency analysis using PowerWorld simulator is discussed which is followed by consideration of optimal power flow (OPF) tool to determine effective system corrections to execute in either the base case followed by a primary contingency or any of the secondary contingencies. It also incorporates two major functionalities namely Minimum Cost and Minimum Control Change which are available in OPF. It is then supplemented by mathematical model for congestion management to prove that the power flow can be affected not only by either varying voltage magnitudes or the power angle but it can also be affected by changing reactance of the transmission line. Therefore, either power angle or voltage magnitude may be used for congestion management. An integrated framework has been proposed after the development of model for power system outages and adjustments, OPF and mathematical model for xiv congestion management. This framework can provide a simulation platform for detailed study of power system to overcome issues like execution of restoration scheme by adding renewable energy resources. For development of RTU, a comparative assessment of performance of both methodologies of RTU design is executed, one based on PLCs and other one based on FPGAs which finalized for development of RTU due to its better performance and reliability. The hardware implementation and verification of this RTU design is done using a starter kit based on XILINX Spartan-3 Series FPGA with 500K logic gates and the MHX-2400 frequency-hopping 2.4 GHz spread-spectrum communications module which had been examined and found suitable as Communication Interface Module for this development. The FPGA based RTU offers flexibility in terms of I/Os, CPU and radio related configurations and expansion can be accommodated quickly if needed as FPGA based designs are reconfigurable. The design of link optimization has been implemented using Radio Mobile Simulator, a well known simulation platform for point to multipoint link optimization. The data transmitted from RTU is being received through Communication Interface Module for data integrity and graphical representation for which further benchmarking is done for Data Communication Protocol to further verify that the proposed solution is well suited for optimized energy management in countries having shortfall of energy. The implementation practical RTU hardware using FPGA include design initialization, main system thread, design modeling and qualification, process synthesis, programming of device and integration of communication interface module (MHX-2400) which interfaced with Spartan 3E using header available on starter kit. Finally, simulation of field inputs (variation in load) and control outputs (circuit breaker and isolators) connected with RTU from test panels has been done in hardware testing phase which allows sample inputs to be varied over the entire input range using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) followed by the suggestions for future work so that the research work may be extended to integrate new features and tools to contribute in the developed RTU hardware.