ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Modeling wait times at Ashesi's cafeteria

Waiting and delays have a negative impact on business as it leads to loss of repeat business and customers. Operations managers are constantly seeking ways to reduce and possibly curb delays. This study looks at the feasibility of modeling as a means to curb delays and improve overall service delivery. This study asks one main question: Whether the process at Akornor can be modeled to provide management enough information to enhance decision making. Using observation and recording, data from Akornor was gathered on four different days. Fifty questionnaires were also administered to customers of Akornor to obtain customer related information. Findings from this study showed that 32% of customers who had to wait were most likely to leave and find other alternatives. Other findings showed that Akornor has average cashier service time of 0.69 minutes for both customers on the meal plan and customers who are not on any plan with Akornor. However, customers on staff discount have an average cashier service time of 0.72 minutes. Cumulative average serving time was 2.34 minutes. Akornor can be modeled but there will be difficulty in obtaining data on arrival rates. However, information on serve time and number of people in a queue is easier to obtain.

Source: Ashesi
Monitoring and control of systems in a small-scale drinking water factory

In the drinking water industry in Ghana, particularly the medium to small-scale factories, there is little or no use of sophisticated automated water treatment or purification systems. Although automation systems in this sector exists, it is only common in larger companies due to the high cost of acquiring these automation systems. Methods of checking the level of water in tanks is inefficient. Operations such as the control of water pumps and performing water quality tests is manual. The lack of automation gives rise to problems such as overflow of tanks and overheating of pumps as a result of running dry. This causes loss of revenue and damage to equipment. In this project, a low-cost automation system was designed using microcontrollers, sensors and relays. The system included the monitoring of water level in the tanks, monitoring of some water quality parameters and the control of water pumps. Data from the sensors were stored in a database. A web dashboard was also created to display data to the user (factory operator) remotely.

Source: Ashesi
Monitoring and Predicting the Remaining Effective Lifetime of Catalytic Converters: A multi-model machine learning approach leveraging BLE OBD-II Telemetry

Vehicular emissions contribute significantly to air pollution, yet real-time monitoring of catalytic converter health is largely absent in consumer applications. this project introduces CatalyticGreaat+, a cloud-native platform for tracking and predictive maintenance of catlytic converters. Vehicle data is captured via a Veepeak OBD-II Bluetooth dongle, processed on an Android app, and transmitted to a microservice-based backend architechture, combining even-driven and request-driven APIS. Three machine learning models - binary classification (98.33% accuracy), trouble-code classification (93.69% accuracy), and regression for remaining useful hours (R2 = 0.8061, MAE = 2.22h, RMSE = 3.71h) - perform inference in under one second, with results stored in MySQL and presented via a mobile dashboard and web portal for mechanics and DVLA staff. The system also integrates CarMuse, a conversational AI built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which allows users to query the system in natural language translating queries into SQL for real-time insights. Key development requirements included compatibility with multiple OBD-II protocols, efficient traffice handling, and an intuitive UI. The system was tested under heavy load, supporting 500 concurrent users at 82 requests with no errors, though average API response time under stress reached 3.2s. Limitations include unecrypted HTTP transmission, Andoid-only support, manual data submission concerns, vehicle indentification using license plates instead of VIN, and the lack of ownership transfer mechanisms. Future work will focus on Kubernetes for scalability, automatic data collection, cross-platform compatibility, geospatial analytics, SSL/TLS implementation, and ownership transfer solutions. This report details the design, implementation, and evaluation of CatalyticGreat+, demonstrating its potential to democratise emissions monitoring and proactive vehicle maintenance. The complete system can be viewed at http://137.184.18.27/.

Source: Ashesi
Monitoring And Predicting The Remaining Effective Lifetime Of Catalytic Converters: A Multi-Model Machine Learning Approach Leveraging BLE OBD-LI Telemetry

Ampomaah Hotel faces continuous operational challenges as a result of its reliance on third-party booking platforms that charge subscription fees and provide discounts without hotel consent. These activities affect the hotel's capacity to control pricing strategies, customer interactions, and booking data ownership, particularly in the divisions of room and conference bookings. To address these challenges, this project focused on developing a digital solution that entails a direct-booking web application, and an AI- powered chatbot. The platform allows users to effortlessly book rooms and conferences, as well as place orders, while the chatbot allows for real-time engagement for inquiries and self-bookings. Furthermore, the system provides hotel administration with options for monitoring reservations, tracking outstanding payments, and controlling pricing and promotions, thereby increasing efficiency in operations and speeding up decision-making processes. These components together assist in answering the research question: How can a custom-built digital system help Ampomaah Hotel regain control over its booking operations and reduce reliance on third-party platforms? Findings from research highlights the potential of digital and mobile technologies in enhancing operational efficiency and improving customer satisfaction in the hospitality sector. However, these studies also highlight major barriers that smaller hotels often face, including high implementation costs, technical complexity and data privacy concerns. Findings suggest that a context-specific digital solution, with AI customer support, can allow the Ampomaah Hotel to regain control over its operations, reduce dependence on third parties, and provide a much smoother and personalized experience to customers,

Source: Ashesi
Monitoring system of a portable household-scale biodigester

The ever-increasing amount of waste as the population grows prompted the primary concern of identifying various methods for reducing the growing amount of waste, in this case, biowaste. Anaerobic digestion methods, when applied to biomass waste, are a cost-effective approach to generating energy while also addressing environmental concerns. The few biodigesters that have been used on the African continent do not live up to their expected life-span. And this is because of lack of a control mechanism to monitor the degradation process in the biodigester. Biodigester monitoring systems that have been used mainly in the developed countries target large bio-energy generating plants. However, these monitoring solutions cannot be used with small house-hold scale biodigesters because of their complexity and high cost. In this project, a low-cost monitoring system of a household-scale biodigester is implemented to help improve the functionality of the biodigesters and in turn increase their life-span.

Source: Ashesi
MonitR: A mobile application for monitoring online accounts’ security

The 21st century has seen a world where almost everything is carried out by digital or electronic means—signalling an end to the traditional approaches. People nowadays transact businesses over the internet due to convenience and accessibility. Taking full advantage of the internet, most institutions especially the financial institutions have also digitalized their services. For this reason, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of online banking and shopping customers. This development has given rise to corresponding increase in cybercrimes, hacking and internet frauds. One of the greatest challenges, hence the cost of migrating an institution’s service online is to provide sufficient internet security mechanisms to secure online users’ accounts. However, most institutions lack the technology needed to support their online presence. Consequently, several cases of unauthorized login and stealing of customers’ information have become rampant. To address this issue, this project not only investigates the dangers of internet insecurity but develops a novel approach to monitoring a user’s online account from fraudsters. The aim of this project is it to monitor, detect and prevent unauthorized account usage using device identification and geofencing techniques.

Source: Ashesi
Movin: Redesigning the online rent search experience for the residential real estate space in Ghana

The impact of technology in our world today is incomparable. It has become easier than ever to accomplish previously tedious tasks such as shopping for food, sending money to loved ones, and even now, finding a place to live. Concerning finding accommodation today, specifically a residential property to rent for a considerable amount of time, many digital tools have been designed to make the process simple and short. However, in Ghana, some of the tools available do not fully streamline the renting process from a custome their evaluation period and finally the end of their search, including a signed leasing agreement between themselves and the landlord or agency handling the property. This applied project proposes a web application with an improved user experience that allows: Customers to better filter through properties and view both information on properties and their respective communities, thereby reducing the many intermediary calls that traditionally occur between customers and landlords or agents working under agencies handling properties. Agencies and landlords to quickly reach a wider audience with their property listings and earn more while seamlessly communicating with interested customers. Kindly note that although all homeowners are referred to as landlords in this paper, the comments in this project apply to both landlords and landladies.

Source: Ashesi
Multi-hop wireless networking in smart homes for the elderly

With the advent of the Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have played an important role in monitoring, tracking and sensing different environmental activities. A variety of MSNs have been used to conduct environmental monitoring. Some of these have failed, often due to the prototype nature of the projects. In agriculture, wireless sensor networks are used to regulate the temperature and humidity within commercial greenhouses. WSNs are iherently unreliable, resource-constrained nodes, and have dynamic topologies. This leads to transmission problems, node problems, link problems, route breakdowns, and congested nodes. However, the capability of the wireless device used limites the coverage area of wireless communication. In this project, a multi-hope wireless sensor network is implemented to control smart home devices while reducing the distance between source and destination nodes to improve energy efficiency.

Source: Ashesi
Multidimensional object storage and retrieval for spatial databases using coordinate transformation: Performance comparison with the use of R-tree and KD-tree indices

In recent times, spatial data has atrracted enough attention that it is being used almost everywhere right from building simple applications such as booking a taxi ride to complex applications such as autonomous driving. While spatial databases have rapidly proliferated in the past decade, extensive research has been conducted on the use of data structures to design efficient algorithms to optimise the storing, retrieving and displaying of spatial data. Research has led to the development of multidimensional index structures such as R-tree and KD-tree among others. Research shows that the GIST framework adopted by Database Management Systems performs slower than the custom implementation of the multidimensional index structures on which the framework was guilt. As a bold step in relying on a custom implementation of the multidimensional index structures, this thesis considered the problem of handling spatial data in geographic coordinates form (i.e. latitudes and longitudes) in a custom implementation of two index structures: R-tree and Kd-tree, as these structure cannot handle effectively geographic coordinates by design. The thesis used coordinate transformation to convert the geographic coordinates into cartesian form for effective handling by both structures mentioned above. Experiments were also conducted to measure the performances of the proposed algorithm that merges coordinate transformation and the custom implementation of R-tree and Kd-tree in terms of object storage, retrieval and removal time costs.

Source: Ashesi
Multipurpose stationary exercising pedaling system

Middle to low-income people in developing countries usually spend most of their time making ends meet. Therefore they do not get time to enhance their physical fitness by exercising. Moreover, frequent power cuts make them stay in the dark at home at night. In this project, an affordable home multipurpose stationary pedaling system is made. The concept of speed detection using a Hall Effect sensor, a magnet, an Arduino and a comparator is used to obtain revolutions per minute (rpm) values and time using Millis. The average maximum speed detected after five experiments is 26.57 rpm. The low-speed detection capacity is attributed to the non-robust application nature of the components used in the project. Simulation results, however, show that the minimum speed that the MatLab Simulink DC machine operating as a generator has to be supplied with is 18850 rpm input to generate power that charges a 12V lead-acid battery. As speed increases, the power produced by the generator increases. Calories burnt are determined using measured power output of the generator and frictional losses of the system converted to Joules using the standard conversion. Moreover, a charge controller that allows discharging the battery above 80% and charging at 40% of its voltage is made using circuit breakers.

Source: Ashesi
My Scholarship Info Consultancy management system: Technology meets the challenge

Over the years, both the government and the private sector have made several efforts to increase the number of educated youths in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, many students, especially from underprivileged backgrounds, lack access to higher education. My Scholarship Info (MSI) is a higher education consultancy that seeks to tackle this problem by identifying, admitting, and providing students from sub-Saharan Africa with higher educational opportunities. This startup, however, needs a system to help automate its processes. A series of literature reviews showed that the current consultancy systems available are standalone and expensive to integrate for a startup. After a careful requirement analysis through interviews, observations, and surveys, the developer discovered that My Scholarship Info needs an efficient system to automate recruiting students, customer service, payments, and more. Thus, this capstone project was undertaken successfully to develop the said system known as the MSI Higher Education Consultancy Management System (HECMS). The HECMS has an application portal, a payment system, an AI chatbot, and two dashboards for admins and students. The HECMS will assist MSI in connecting high school students from sub-Saharan Africa, especially those from underserved backgrounds, to higher educational opportunities, thus contributing to SDGs 4 and 10.

Source: Ashesi
MyRide: The future of intelligent transport system in Ghana

Public transit is a very important tool in Ghana for those looking to ease their commutes and also reduce car dependence. Due to the high reliance from the public, the need for information about the public system is very significant to those patronizing the service. This report presents MyRide system -an intelligent transit information system that uses the internet, mobile technology, GPS satellites and crowd sourcing. Its objective is to facilitate intra-city transportation in Ghana by providing real time information about buses. The information is provided via channels such as mobile devices, the web and SMS. Users of MyRide are not only limited to bus riders, but can also be employed by bus drivers and the bus management. It is aimed to be used by transit agencies that have a structured system of relaying their services to the commuters. The report discusses user requirements specification, system design and architecture, implementation of the system, and finally, testing and results.

Source: Ashesi
Natemba Health Information System

The Natembea Healthcare Center at Ashesi University is facing challenges with the use of Microsoft Excel to store data related to their operations: patient medical records and logistics inventory. The current system is not effective in supporting the delivery of high-quality services, resulting in issues such as difficulties in storing, retrieving, and sharing patient medical records. This capstone project aims to build an efficient web-based health information system that enables Natembea health officials to record and store patients' medical records and other management purposes such as drug and medical consumables equipment. Conducting literature reviews revealed that currently, most hospitals and small-scale healthcare centers are adopting the use of similar software in their operation, which has brought improved patient care, reduced paperwork, and better record-keeping and others. The project employs the agile methodology and the Model View-Controller architecture, and technologies (bootstrap, ajax, JavaScript, jQuery libraries, etc.) to achieve its goals. Additionally, the project is utilizing Human Computer Interaction (HCI) theories like User-Centered Design and Gestalt Theory to improve the system's usability to meet the demands of Natembea Health officials.

Source: Ashesi
Natembea Response: Pioneering Innovative Emergency Medical Services Through Emergency Ambulance Solutions

This capstone project presents the development of Natembea Response, an Emergency Ambulance System designed to address the lack of emergency transportation services at Ashesi University. Through a mobile application, users (students and faculty) can request ambulance assistance and connect with the nearest available ambulance from Natembea health center in real time. The system integrates Google Maps, Firebase, and real-time location tracking to streamline the emergency response process. The project aims to reduce response times, improve health outcomes, and strengthen the overall emergency infrastructure on campus.

Source: Ashesi
National Health Insurance module for Yaresa mobile health application

As a middle income country, Ghana has made formidable strides in improving health care delivery in the country. Notable among them is the introduction of the Community Health and Planning Services system. This system was adopted to increase access to and use of health care services by setting up health centers known us CHPS zones in the remote communities where it is particularly difficult for Ghanaians to receive proper and timely medical attention. These health centers are manned by few trained healthcare officers whose tasks are not limited to just providing health care to patients but involve book keeping, report drafting and a number of other more administrative tasks which takes a lot of time away from providing actual health care services to patients. One such task identified by health officers is the preparation of NHIS insurance claims. An ongoing Mobile Health project for CHPS zones has been developing an application to assist health officers in performing some of these tasks. However this does not include preparation of NHIS insurance claims which provides the basis for the project that this report discusses. The aim of the project is to provide functionality to the existing Mobile Health application that facilitates the preparation of NHIS insurance claims.

Source: Ashesi
Nearby Teacher Finder: A location-based private teacher recommendation system for pupils

This project seeks to address challenges pupils face when looking for a teacher within their location who offers extra lessons in a particular subject. It also aims to address the primary challenge teachers who provide tuitions face, i.e., publicizing themselves to pupils in need of their service. In Zambia, just like other countries, the practice of taking lessons outside the class schedule has gained ground among secondary school pupils. They choose to do this to improve their academic performance, which becomes poor due to inefficiencies in the teaching-learning process in some schools. In this project, the solution is a location-based system that discovers teachers for a particular subject based on the pupil's location . In addition, pupils can view teacher profiles and interact with them.

Source: Ashesi
NEWSHIVE: An Interactive Map-based Web Application for Ghanaian Sourced News

News is an essential component in driving the global economy forward by providing information about various topics. While online news is increasing, some information like the location of the news may not be apparent to the user. In accordance with these challenges, getting news in Ghana continues to be difficult as many Ghanaians still rely on radio stations, televisions, and the purchase of printed hardcopies of newspapers on the go. This untimely and unreliable content undercuts the main purpose of news consumption. And the citizens who prefer to read news online are subjected to dispersed news across several websites, which are glitchy, and unreliable in their presentation. This capstone project seeks to develop and test a web application that creates and efficient news channel by introducing categorized visual news that aggregates news from various online sources into a user-friendly map interface, to presents news in a concise and timely manner. By negating the shortcomings of the other available channels, this will improve the accessibility and adoption of online news reading among Ghanaians. In this capstone project report, a client-server architecture was adopted in the implementation of the interactive map-based news platform. The results obtained from testing showcased that, this full stack application provided users with a more efficient and timelier channel for news consumption as compared to the generic means that Ghanaians adopted. Some challenges and limitations of the system included the inability to generate news articles that are specific to certain regions in the country due to restrictions of the adopted tech stack (Google Maps API).

Source: Ashesi
NILM- based system for energy monitoring of compound houses in Ghana

Compound housing is a housing arrangement that stemmed from cultural family living settings. Over the years, it has evolved to denote a group of different households that share a number of utilities including electricity. Electricity bills and payments are a concern in such living units due to the inability to split bills fairly. Previous work done to solve this are either expensive, or do not take into consideration the complexity of electricity connections in such houses. This thesis aims at verifying if the Feedforward Artificial Neural Network (ANN) can be used to split bills by implementing a Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring System for Compound Houses in Ghana. The proposed algorithm’s performance is compared to Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and its variants. It was discovered that the Feedforward ANN had higher overall performance than the HMM and its variants, and is efficient for splitting electricity bills in compound houses.

Source: Ashesi