ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on people all across the world. Even though the number of verified COVID-19 cases is steadily decreasing, the danger persists. Only societal awareness and preventative measures can assist to minimize the number of impacted patients in the work environment. People often forget to wear masks before entering the work premises or are not careful enough to wear masks correctly. Keeping this in mind, this paper proposes an IoT-based architecture for taking all essential steps to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed low-cost architecture is divided into three components: one to detect face masks by using deep learning technologies, another to monitor contactless body temperature and the other to dispense disinfectants to the visitors. At first, we review all the existing state-of-the-art technologies, then we design and develop a working prototype. Here, we present our results with the accuracy of 97.43% using a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 99.88% accuracy using MobileNetV2 deep learning architecture for automatic face mask detection. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
Obesity is a metabolic condition that accounts for life-threatening disorders like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and type-2 diabetes. There are several anti-obesity drugs currently available on the market, but many of them show poor bioavailability due to low water solubility. Several attempts have been made by researchers to improve the solubility of orally administered drugs, but many of them did not work properly. Herein, we introduced a block copolymer micelle consisting of poly (lactic acid)-co-poly (ethylene glycol) to improve the solubility of the anti-obesity drug "Fenofibrate”. The block copolymer was synthesized using the polycondensation method, while the micelle was formed when water was added dropwise to the copolymer. Finally, laser light scattering and DLS analysis were used to confirm the micelle formation. The size of the micelle increased from 158 nm to 249 nm after the fenofibrate drug loading inside the hydrophobic core. The polymer PLA-co-PEG can be used as a carrier for orally administered fenofibrate drugs in the future for better water solubility and efficiency. © The Electrochemical Society