ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Ga dictionary application: An android and web platform to facilitate the easy learning of the Ga traditional language

Communication by a common language is an effective tool to foster oneness and efficient productivity in a diverse community such as Ghana which has over 50 languages. Matched with this is the ever growing rate of the cell phone patronage in Ghana, with over 65% of the populace being owners of a mobile device, as well as the gradual increment in smart phones ownership, allowing Ghanaians to tap into various resources provided by the internet. Resources may include but are not limited to mobile applications, cloud services and pools of information from various databases. A clear observation made was the absence of efficient online translation tools to aid the learning process of Ghanaian local languages. The project identifies the absence of the online presence of vital translation tools with respect to the ever growing improvements in mobile technologies. It focuses on the Ga Traditional language and attempts to provide translation services to tourists, Ga students (mostly in junior high schools), the Ga diaspora and any and every interested party. It is motivated by the Afrocentric need to bridge the technological gap as well as promote Ghana online.

Source: Ashesi
General course scheduling application

Heuristic algorithms have been known to be the most common and effective methods to solving the classical course scheduling problem which has been found to be a non deterministic polynomial time hard problem. Many software systems have been built on these algorithms to provide a standard and working solution. This paper seeks to look at the gaps of these solutions and propose a newer one which would potentially simplify the process of course scheduling and provide an even more effective solution within the scope of Ghana. This paper provides a course scheduling web application which implements a genetic algorithm as a solution.

Source: Ashesi
Generational Perceptions of CSR And its Impact on Customer-Based Brand Equity Among Ghanaian Youth: A Qualitative Study

This study investigates the perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) among Millennials and Generation Z in Ghana, highlighting the role of these perceptions in shaping Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) among Ghanaian youth. While extent research in this field has successfully established the relationship between CSR initiatives and brand equity, it fails to address the fundamental mechanisms through which consumer perceptions of CSR are formed and subsequently influence brand equity. Addressing this gap, the study employs a qualitative, interpretivist approach using semi-structured interviews to explore the interplay of generational values, subjective and culturally situated factors shaping these generationsth long-term community development, while Gen Z emphasizes authenticity, sustainability, and alignment with personal values. The study found that while CSR influences brand perception and emotional connection, it does not have much effect on purchasing intentions, especially in a context where product quality and affordability remain primary determinants. The study highlights the strategic role CSR can play in enhancing brand equity when initiatives are perceived as credible, relevant, and aligned with local social concerns. It also uncovers a critical insight: generational differences must be accounted for in designing CSR strategies that effectively engage Ghanas.

Source: Ashesi
Geographic Information System: Customer management and service application for small and medium enterprises in Ghana

The project aims at providing a user-friendly application to enable Ghanaian small-scale firms to provide better after-sales service support. The provision of effective and efficient door-to-door customer service in Ghana has been a challenge to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This can be attributed to cost of acquiring technology that can help to streamline processes. However, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have improved significantly has become accessible in recent years. This enables SMEs to make use of it in order to save time and cost in their quest to reach desired destinations and provide customers with quality services. The implementation of such a tool in a customer management application used by SMEs will aid in the organization’s provision of valuable services to its customers. The tool will help to save time and maximize the use of resources in planning and executing field service trips. The application developed provides a customer management software with Geographic Information System to SMEs. The tool can make an impact on processes used in planning after-sales service. It will provide organizations the power to provide effective and efficient services to customers.

Source: Ashesi
Geolocation with LoRa and machine learning using TDOA algorithm

A vehicle tracking system is a crucial system used in fields such as transportation, delivery services, and criminal investigations. GPS and GSM system is the most popular means of determining vehicle location. It is accurate; however, it is costly and consumes a lot of power due to the need for frequent battery replacement. Implementing it in local public transportation, especially in African countries is not feasible. This is because installation and maintenance are expensive. Various research has been going on to improve geolocation with LoRa. However, one of the issues that remain is the time accuracy in collecting the time of arrival which is crucial in determining the vehicle position in the Time of Difference of Arrival (TDOA) algorithm. This project designed a low-cost and low-power LoRa vehicle tracking system and researched ways to improve LoRa geolocation using the TDOA algorithm using machine learning. A multilateration algorithm was used in positioning station gateways for the TDOA algorithm to provide an accurate measurement, it required a nanoseconds precision, however, only a millisecond precision was achieved from the hardware setup. The machine learning model used RandomForest for training and prediction advantages. The lack of a microcontroller with a nanoseconds precision, limited resources to build a full multilateration system affected the accuracy of the TDOA algorithm.

Source: Ashesi
Ghana Police case complaint [whistle blower] management system

In the last fifty years, concerns about the effectiveness of complaint procedures for the police have been widely expressed, leading to reforms. The police complaints systems are designed to serve the interests of various stakeholders and the public. This project's goal is to create a bespoke prototype computerized case complaint management system for the Ghana Police Service that focuses on optimizing operations including filing a case, reporting and management/administrative chores. The system was built and constructed utilizing PHP programming language to handle the back-end operations, MySQL database for the data storage procedures, and HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for the front-end design. The computerized system offers a visual user interface that is trustworthy, oriented, secure, efficient and effective.

Source: Ashesi
Ghanaian language integration on Android smartphones

The main aim of this project is to integrate local languages spoken and written in Ghana into the input method services of smartphones. The high penetration of mobile devices in and across Africa continues to be an interesting phenomenon and this does not exclude smartphones. Since the introduction of smartphones, their production and customization has been skewed towards users and consumers in the West. Therefore the localization of the features of smartphones for the African environment has been very slowed if not stopped. The major result of this is that text based mobile messaging is limited to characters of only the dominant languages of the world such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. This leaves consumers especially in Ghana to resort to replacing the special characters of their local language with either numbers of symbols or totally ignore their use. This might conflict with the correct use of the local language in context. The goal of this project is to right this by implementing an input method service also known as a soft keyboard (SoftKeyboard) for the android smartphone platform which would represent the special characters in local languages spoken in Ghana. The end result should be a user-friendly and intuitive and interactive keyboard that satisfies Akan, which is a major spoken language across Ghana and other select languages in the country.

Source: Ashesi
Going regional: Internationalisation strategies of Ghanaian service companies within the ECOWAS market

This paper investigates the internationalisation strategies of Ghanaian service companies within the economic community of West African States (ECOWAS) market. The topic was necessitated by the increasing interest in the study of internationalisation processes of local firms in this era of globalisation, which hitherto was the preserve of multinational enterprises from the developed world. There is very little research on internationalisation processes of firms within the developing economy context as most of the existing literature is biased towards the developed economy context especial in the UK and USA. This paper examines the internationalisation strategies of Ghanaian service companies within the ECOWAS market in order to determine the key strategies adopted by Ghanaian service companies when expanding their operations abroad. The research was based on three case studies of service-oriented firms in Ghana using semi-structured interviews. Data was analysed using cross-case synthesis. Key strategies such as modes of entry of the three companies were analysed. The results of this study validates previous studies such as the Uppsala model which suggests that companies often expand their operations internationally on incremental and gradual fashion, and the eclectic paradigm which contends that three major sets of factors that are interdependent will influence the extent, industrial composition and geography of foreign production undertaken by a firm. Implications are also drawn for service companies, policy makers and researchers.

Source: Ashesi
GUI-based fleet planning visualisation tool.

Visualising data and interpreting it is a common activity we do on a daily basis. The human mind is able to identify patterns easily and extract information from visual contents much faster than it does from raw data. For this reason, visualisation tools of any kind serve to facilitate understanding of otherwise complex information or situations. Visualisation serves as a very useful tool for planning routes and scheduling tasks. In this project, visualisation is employed to increase the usefulness of a fleet planning application. The purpose of visualisation here is to provide a platform for easy formulation of problems and also for easy representation of solutions to these problems.

Source: Ashesi
Halo: Innovating inventory management at Abeer Pharmacy Ltd

The job of a pharmacist is one of the most endearing and community-oriented occupations of our day where individuals provide medications for the people around them in order to better their health and as a result overall livelihood. At Abeer Pharmacy Limited, being a pharmacist is tough, as a high influx of daily customer and archaic means of inventory management leads to constant inventory losses. Halo is an inventory management system that goes beyond the add, edit and delete to provide a more secure, enjoyable and unique experience for these pharmacists. With the help of innovative functionalities, queries and computations data from operations can be syphoned and used by the system to provide their management with analytical information to help them make informed decisions in restocking, selling practices and employee assessment. With Halo by their side, efficiency, safety and success is almost guaranteed.

Source: Ashesi
Hardware accelerated embedded machine learning

Hardware acceleration is a common method of improving the performance of algorithms running on general purpose processors. However it is not a widely used method for improving algorithms on embedded microcontroller units. This project investigates the performance gain associated with adding a hardware accelerator to a microcontroller unit (MCU) for a machine learning inference task using different scenarios. This work focuses on comparing the performance of four different scenarios: an 8-bit MCU only, an 8-bit MCU with a hardware accelerator, a 32-bit MCU only, and a 32-bit MCU with a hardware accelerator. Research was conducted by performing benchmark tests on each scenario using a machine learning inference task. The results showed that the addition of a hardware accelerator significantly improved the performance of the 8-bit MCU for the inference task and decreased performance for the 32- bit MCU. In conclusion, the study found that lower-end MCUs tend to gain more from a hardware accelerator than higher-end MCUs for machine learning inference tasks. The research has practical implications for developers and engineers working with MCUs in the context of machine learning inference, as it suggests that adding a hardware accelerator can be a cost-effective way to improve the performance of lower-end MCUs.

Source: Ashesi
Hardware and software modules development for multi-sensor fire detection and remedial control using fuzzy logic and convolutional neural networks

Despite the fire safety campaigns, the rate at which fire outbreaks continue to rise requires an engineered solution system that can detect a fire early before it escalates and send a notification system to the fire service crew. This paper addresses the situation by designing and developing a fuzzy logic-based multisensor fire detection.. The designed solution also has a web-based and SMS notification system with trained convolutional neural networks for proximity and wide-area fire detection. The Raspberry pi 4 model processes data using three fire signatures, smoke flame and heat, using the MQ2 sensor, IR flame sensor, and DHT22 senor, respectively using the fuzzy logic algorithm to determine the fire status. With broader coverage, the convolutional neural network ensure wide-area fire detection using the Raspberry pi came 5MP. By incorporating an email, a web-based, and SMS notification system, the fire service crew gets real-time notification of fire scenes, the location of the fire scenes, and map integration in the web app to help them navigate to the residence. The residents of the fire scene also get alerts via the mobile app and SMS. The efficiency and response time of this paper's final engineered solution system showed significant improvements with early fire detection and notification. The final experiment and performance evaluation results the CNN has an accuracy of 96% while the fuzzy logic is 98%.

Source: Ashesi
Hardware-Accelerated Embedded Machine Learning on a Softcore Processor

Embedded machine learning (EML) systems often struggle to meet real-time requirements because general-purpose microcontrollers (MCUs) lack the computational throughput needed for fast inference. Hardware accelerators offer a solution by boosting inference speed, but in many designs, off-chip accelerators introduce communication overheads that critically degrade system latency. This work addresses that bottleneck through a hardware-software co-design that integrates a MicroBlaze softcore processor and a neural network accelerator on a single FPGA, eliminating off-chip data transfers. We evaluate four configurations: baseline inference on a silicon-based STM32F091RC MCU and a softcore processor, alongside their accelerated variants. Using a Morse code decoding neural network, results demonstrate that the on-chip softcore-accelerator integration achieves a 420oglocalized design sustains sub-20

Source: Ashesi
Head-Up Display Visor to Imrove MotorCyclists' Situation Awareness

Dispatch riders and motorcyclists for courier services must juggle answering calls from customers about their current locations and using the phones GPS to locate customers. All these tasks are burdensome on the rider and may easily result in the motorcyclists veering off the road, colliding with an oncoming vehicle, or knocking down a pedestrian. One reason for this misjudgment is the helmet's limitation of the rider's peripheral vision, which is crucial for realistic speed perception(Cannon,1987). Motorcyclists have a restricted view of their surroundings and the road when wearing a helmet. Thus, they often make expensive misjudgments about the traffic situations and vehicles within their proximity on the road. To check their surroundings, motorcyclists would have to veer their attention from the road, and this is one of the causes of accidents involving motor riders. In this project, a head-up display visor in a human interactive device is mounted on the motorcyclist's helmet to aid motorcyclists in obtaining information about the surroundings and increasing the safety of motorcyclists when riding.

Source: Ashesi
Health behaviours and vaccination predictions

The emergence of infectious diseases that threatened the lives of living organisms brought about the introduction of vaccines. Vaccines and vaccinations are a way of curbing pandemics and saving the lives of millions of organisms worldwide that may have lost their lives to infectious diseases. The principle of vaccination is to prevent living organisms from further acquiring infectious diseases. However, the introduction of vaccinations to control pandemics birthed misconceptions even though infectious diseases were killing millions of people. Thus, the term "vaccine hesitancy" was birthed. This research answers the question, can we predict the likelihood of vaccine hesitancy based on people's background information? This will be done using machine learning models such as LASSO regression, Artificial Neural Network, Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine, and the Gradient Boosting Machine to predict the vaccine hesitancy. The data for this research contains 36 predictors, including h1n1_concern, h1n1_knowlwdge, education, sex, age, rage, marital status, etc., and two target variables, namely h1n1_vaccine and seasonal_vaccine. This research shows that, indeed, the vaccine hesitancy of people can be predicted based on their background information. The LASSO regression model used to experiment with this hypothesis predicted that out of the 26,708 data of respondents used, 20,149 respondents did not take the H1N1 vaccine, and 2425 respondents took the vaccine, with an accuracy of 84.25%.

Source: Ashesi
Health data exchange information system for registered health care providers in Ghana

The consequences of a patient’s health record not being available at the time of treatment can be very cataclysmic. Accidental human deaths have occurred by the interference of certain medications with some undisclosed health conditions of patients due to the absence of their medical history not being available at the time of treatment. The purpose of this capstone project is to build and test the effectiveness of web-based inter-operable software which enables the global transfer of the required health information of patients across different hospitals in a secured manner; some of which may be using different health information systems (HIS) running on different storage facilities. Literature review research showed that currently, a system that provides the global exchange of health information across various health care providers. In this capstone project report, a simple architectural design was used to implement the proposed interoperable health information exchange system. Most health care providers use different health information systems and as such, the results obtained from testing the developed software showed that with a single application programming interface(API), health care providers could request for a patient’s health record from another hospital and with different APIs, a patients health record can be sent to the appropriate health care provider.

Source: Ashesi
Health hub

This paper discusses the development of the health hub for remote areas with the goal of tracking the medical vitals those living in underserved areas. As access to healthcare is a need and a right, the project seeks to give people this fundamental human right. The health hub was designed to provide users with a variety of services, such as scanning and monitoring vital healthcare measurements such as pulse rate, and blood pressure. The health hub comprises of a health station with access to a computer vision-powered web application that engages patients in recording their data The health hub is projected to have a substantial influence on people s health in rural areas by providing them with dependable and simple-to-use medical vital monitoring services that would otherwise be unavailable. The health hub is a multi-tier computer vision-powered web-based app that allows patients to record medical data. The paper finishes by evaluating the system s components and recommending future enhancements and restrictions for the system.

Source: Ashesi
Health Kiosk: An IoT based community health center

Timely access to quality health care is an essential part of the well-being and health of individuals in any community. However, access to healthcare has been a significant problem throughout the world. The WHO estimates that over 50% of the world's population do not have access to needed healthcare services. This reveals the massive gap between the available healthcare facility and the demand for healthcare. In Ghana and most developing countries, the lack of health facilities has resulted in overcrowding in hospitals and pressure on the available facilities. It is against this background that this project seeks to design and develop an IoMT Point of Care (POC) system (called the Health Kiosk) to bridge the gap between the availability and demand for healthcare at a reltively lower cost. The Health Kiosk is comprised of a hardware component that collects patient's vitals and transmits them to an online database. The vitals can then be accessed from a web application that collects patient health records and enables doctors to provide diagnoses and prescriptions. The system also hope to enable doctors to track their patients' medical history while allowing patients to monitor their health on the go.

Source: Ashesi
Health Management System

Hospitals in Ghana still operate with the file-based system approach due to the absence of a health management system. While this approach works, it is an ineffective way to store and manage health records. Hospitals consume large amounts of paper in preparing medical records, lab reports, and prescriptions. With information scattered all over the place, it becomes difficult to manage and keep track of. In this paper, a solution proposed is a health management system whereby various hospital personnel log in and digitally perform their duties. The aim is to enhance medical treatment quality, facilitate with distance communication, data sharing, and improve internal communication. A key functionality comes in the form of report generation, which seeks to automate the process of creating reports which follow the format of reports submitted to higher authorities such as the district health ministry.

Source: Ashesi