1 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Sarajevo, Zmaja od Bosne 33-35, 71 000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; 2 Faculty of Chemistry and Technology, University of Split, Teslina 10, 21 000 Split, Croatia; 3 Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Sarajevo, Zmaja od Bosne 33-35, 71 000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; 4 Clinical Center of the University of Sarajevo, Organizational unit Clinical chemistry and biochemistry, Bolnička 25, 71 000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; 5 Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Sarajevo, Zmaja od Bosne 8, 71 000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina; E-mail: islamovic.safija@gmail.com

This article describes the process of competence-based curriculum development in nursing education at Western Balkan (WB) universities. Nursing education in the WB has been noncompliant with the standard educational approaches of the European Union's directive on regulated professions. The overall aim of the TEMPUS project "Competency-Based Curriculum Reform in Nursing and Caring in Western Balkan Universities" was to bring curricular reform for bachelor's nursing education in the WB region in line with competence-based education and professional standards to demonstrate compliance with all member countries of the European Union.

The phenomenon of the increasing number of ageing people in the world is arguably the most significant economic, health and social challenge that we face today. Additionally, one of the major epidemiologic trends of current times is the increase in chronic and degenerative diseases. This paper tries to deliver a more up to date overview of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age and provide a more detailed outlook on the research that has gone into this field. First, challenges for seniors, including chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age, are specified. Second, a review of seniors’ needs and concerns is performed. Finally, solutions that can improve seniors’ quality of life are discussed. Publications obtained from the following databases are used in this scoping review: Web of Science, PubMed, and Science Direct. Four independent reviewers screened the identified records and selected relevant publications published from 2010 to 2017. A total of 1916 publications were selected. In all, 52 papers were selected based on abstract content. For further processing, 21 full papers were screened.” The results indicate disabilities as a major problem associated with seniors’ activities of daily living dependence. We founded seven categories of different conditions - psychological problems, difficulties in mobility, poor cognitive function, falls and incidents, wounds and injuries, undernutrition, and communication problems. In order to minimize ageing consequences, some areas require more attention, such as education and training; technological tools; government support and welfare systems; early diagnosis of undernutrition, cognitive impairment, and other diseases; communication solutions; mobility solutions; and social contributions. This scoping review supports the view on chronic diseases in old age as a complex issue. To prevent the consequences of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age related problems demands multicomponent interventions. Early recognition of problems leading to disability and activities of daily living (ADL) dependence should be one of essential components of such interventions.

Automated detection of asphalt pavement distresses is a very popular computer vision and image processing problem. In recent years, automated detection is an essential part of every pavement management system, since it allows very fast detection of distresses on the road. This is important because timely detection can prevent many road accidents, and hence it has potential to save lives. In this paper, we presented a new unsupervised image processing method for segmentation of the most common road distresses-pavement cracks. The method first performs slicing of an image into M×N sub-images, and then removes sub-images without cracks based on empirically defined threshold. Analysis is then carried out only on a small number of sub-images, which significantly reduces computation time. Then, a series of images processing tasks are performed to select only pixels with pavement cracks. The method is suitable as a pre-processing step in a number of computer vision tasks, and can provide rough estimation of damaged area in an image.

Visual impairment severely constraints the ability to independently conduct many everyday tasks that we usually do not consider challenging. Although some types of visual impairment can be treated efficiently there is still a considerable number of visually impaired persons, especially among aging population, which depend on help of others or assistive technology to sustain their life quality. Visually impaired person cannot perceive the full extent of surrounding information due to the lack of visual details. However great progress can be achieved if surrounding information can be somehow visually transformed to the subset of visual information that visually impaired person can perceive. To certain extent every impairment has individual characteristics, as different individuals may better respond to different subsets of visual information. Thus any assistive solution aiming to visually transform surrounding information to accommodate broad range of impairment conditions must be personalized in order to be effective. Virtual reality enables individuals to experience imaginary surroundings by tricking their visual senses and such virtual surroundings can be personalized to any extent desired. We use virtual reality, image processing, and RFID to create a test setup able to simulate visual impairment and visually transformed surroundings suitable for visual Impairment studies. The test setup enables gathering information and conducting studies on both healthy and visually impaired individuals in a controlled environment enabling reliable assistive technology development and testing.

Visually impaired person might find it very difficult to locate an object that has been even slightly misplaced from its usual position. Unfortunately this is very common situation in a shared environment where multiple individuals can affect object’s position and where visually impaired person cannot rely on object’s position remaining unchanged since the last interaction with the object. In order to independently localize the object of its interest visually impaired person must rely on assistive technology. It is yet very unlikely that any single wearable assistive device will encompass the whole range of object localization scenarios and be universally adoptable to a broad range of environments. In this paper we propose indoors test setup for visually impaired persons by creating RFID based assistive environment – Visual Impairment Friendly RFID Room. The test setup can be used to evaluate RFID object localization and its use by visually impaired persons.

The aim of this paper is comparing a simulation model with real IPTV (Internet Protocol TeleVision) scenario in access network. In real IPTV scenarios, it is known that packet losses appear suddenly and might have an "explosive" character, especially in DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) case. In addition, these packet losses usually appear in groups and lead to huge degradation of the video service, which decreases customer’s QoE (Quality of Experience) level. Hence, estimation of this degradation in access network is important and the paper explained one simulation model based on SSIM (Structural Similarity Index) analysis, which can be used as one perceptive video quality assessment by imitating a real environment with packet losses. To check this, we compared our simulation model with the real IPTV video distributed over DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and exposed to different packet loss appearances.

The paper presents an algorithm for automatic layout of class diagrams. The presented algorithm efficiently and openly tries to lay out a diagram in the landscape format using a modified Sugiyama algorithm. The proposed algorithm is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and works within Papyrus class diagram modeling projects.