An Assessment Framework for the Transformation of Mobility 4.0 in Smart Cities

Patients' Preference for Pharmaceutical Dosage Forms: Does It Affect Medication Adherence? A Cross-Sectional Study in Community Pharmacies

Background

Dosage forms (DF), which are primarily divided into solid, semisolid, liquid, and gaseous, are among the different factors that influence drug adherence. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate how patients' preferences for pharmaceutical DF affected their adherence to medication in community pharmacies in Gondar town.

Methods

A cross-sectional study on community pharmacies was carried out from June 25 to July 27, 2023. The statistical package for social sciences, version 26, was used for data analysis. Factors associated with patient medication discontinuation were found using both bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions.

Results

According to our study, the majority of respondents (42.4%) preferred tablet DF. Most respondents (63.9%) DF preference was affected by the size of the medication, in which small-sized were most preferable (59.6%). The oral route of administration was the most preferable (71.2%). The majority of the respondents (59.9%) had a history of discontinuation of medicines. Being male (AOR=2.21, 95% CI: 1.29, 3.79), living in rural areas (AOR=1.98, 95% CI: 1.03, 3.83), types of DF (AOR=4.59, 95% CI: 1.28, 16.52), high frequency of administration (AOR=2.22, 95% CI: 1.08, 4.57), high cost of medication (AOR=3.09, 95% CI: 1.69, 5.68), getting some improvement from illness (AOR=3.29, 95% CI: 1.10, 9.87), and high number of drugs (AOR=3.29, 95% CI: 1.67, 13.85) were significantly associated with medication discontinuation.

Conclusion

Our findings showed that tablet dosage forms, oral routes of administration, and once-daily taking of medicines were the most preferred by our respondents. Being male, living in rural areas, types of DF, high frequency of administration, high cost of medication, getting some improvement from illness, and high number of drugs were significantly associated with medication discontinuation. This provides an insight into what to consider when prescribing medicine to enhance patients' adherence and overall therapeutic outcomes.

The Transition of Cities towards Innovations in Mobility: Searching for a Global Perspective

The growing concentration of the population in urban areas presents great challenges for sustainability. Within this process, mobility emerges as one of the main generators of externalities that hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. The transition of cities towards innovations in sustainable mobility requires progress in different dimensions, whose interaction requires research. Likewise, it is necessary to establish whether the experiences developed between cities with different contexts can be extrapolated. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify how the conditions that determine a city’s readiness to implement urban mobility innovations could be combined. For this, qualitative comparative analysis was applied to a model developed using the multi-level perspective, analyzing 60 cities from different geographical areas and with a different gross domestic product per capita. The R package Set Methods was used. The explanation of the readiness of cities to implement mobility innovations is different to the explanation of the readiness negation. While readiness is explained by two solutions, in which only regime elements appear, the negation of readiness is explained by five possible solutions, showing the interaction between the landscape and regimen elements and enacting the negation of innovations as a necessary condition. The cluster analysis shows us that the results can be extrapolated between cities with different contexts.

Developing a Smart City Logistics Assessment Framework (SCLAF): A Conceptual Tool for Identifying the Level of Smartness of a City Logistics System

One of the main building blocks for sustainable cities is the development and efficient operation of a viable and sustainable city logistics system. City logistics exhibit several practical complications due to the conflicting interests of multiple actors involved, as well as the vague role or reluctant involvement of the public sector. Despite the plethora of innovative city logistics initiatives developed in European cities and European policy priorities towards the promotion of smart cities, little is known about the level of smartness of city logistics systems in Europe. In response to that, this paper proposes a conceptual multi-criteria and multi-assessment framework as a guidance tool for city planners, aiming to support the in-depth understanding of the main components of a smart city logistics ecosystem and facilitate the self-assessment of a city’s level of smartness. The proposed framework represents a four-level hierarchical assessment pyramid involving four main impact areas: (i) smart governance, (ii) smart economy, (iii) smart actors, and (iv) smart environment. A more in-depth analysis of each impact area is separately conducted by deconstructing the impact areas in specific criteria, sub-criteria, and KPIs. This paper presents in detail the methodology followed and the main components of this tool.

A Taxonomy for Threat Actors’ Delivery Techniques

The main contribution of this paper is to provide an accurate taxonomy for delivery techniques, which allows the detection of novel techniques and the identification of appropriate countermeasures. Delivery is a key stage for offensive cyber operations. During delivery, a threat actor tries to gain an initial foothold into the targeted infrastructure. It is the first step of an offensive cyber operation, where the threat actor interacts with its victim in a hostile way; thus, its success is mandatory for the global achievement of the operation. However, delivery techniques are not well structured among the literature, being in many cases a simple list of techniques with which, if one of them is slightly modified by the threat actor, its detection becomes very difficult. This situation hinders the modeling of hostile actors, a fact that makes it difficult to identify countermeasures to detect and neutralize their malicious activities. In this work, we analyze the current delivery techniques’ classification approaches and the problems linked to them. From this analysis, we propose a novel taxonomy that allows the accurate classification of techniques, overcoming the identified problems and allowing both the discovery of new techniques and the detection of gaps in deployed countermeasures. Our proposal significantly reduces the amount of effort needed to identify, analyze, and neutralize hostile activities from advanced threat actors, in particular their initial access stage. It follows a logical structure that can be easy to expand and adapt, and it can be directly used in the industry’s commonly accepted standards, such as MITRE ATT&CK.

Defining a Digital System for the Pedestrian Network as a Conceptual Implementation Framework

In cities today, the digitalization of mobility is one of the most crucial tools that link each single mobility service providers (e.g., ride sharing, public transportation, air travel, etc.) to users. Based on the smart pedestrian network model, the purpose of this study is to initially provide the requirements towards the digitalization of a pedestrian network model and subsequently to draft an institutional framework towards the effective implementation and management of pedestrian mobility that will develop/create a pedestrian network as a new structure in the city. The methodology is applied in three phases, with three separate approaches: “desk approach” for a data gathering standard that is knowledge-based and connected to walkability; a “digitalization approach” for citizen and stakeholder participation in policy co-creation; and a “business approach”. A business approach is defined as a set of operations that takes one or more types of input and produces a customer-valued outcome. In this case, customers are citizens and the business approach by applying a digital system is assessing policies and finding/defining an optimized combination of shared applicable/effective policies to implement the pedestrian network. By boosting an innovative linkage of these three phases, digitalization of the pedestrian network has great potential to improve the walkability planning process and therefore to create more sustainable and livable urban spaces.