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Online shopping has revolutionized our daily lives in the modern era. We can purchase needed goods on mobile shopping applications (apps) anytime and anywhere without leaving home. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become increasingly dependent on various mobile shopping activities. However, the visual design of the shopping app interface often affects the user's interactive experience and the efficiency of browsing product information. In addition, gender differences are also worth being considered in the shopping interface design process. To achieve the goal, the research conducted a user study (N=40) of a 2× 2 x 2 mixed factorial design (i.e., information layout x display mode x gender difference). Each participant performed four tasks during the experiment. The authors measured the task completion time, collected the subjective responses from the SUS and the 7-point Likert scale questionnaire, and interviewed participants. The results revealed that: (1) females perform faster in lighter mode when searching for information location, while males perform faster in darker mode. (2) The information layout affects the user's visual search performance and subjective evaluation;females prefer the list style, but men prefer the matrix style. (3) Participants (both males and females) perceived matrix style as more popular than list style in dark mode;however, the result was reversed in light mode. The findings generated from the research can serve as a good reference for the development of user experience in the user interface design of mobile shopping apps. © 2013 IEEE.
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Objective: To investigate the clinical features and short-term prognosis of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection associated acute encephalopathy (AE). Methods: Retrospective cohort study. The clinical data, radiological features and short-term follow-up of 22 cases diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 infection associated AE in the Department of Neurology, Beijing Children's Hospital from December 2022 to January 2023 were retrospectively analyzed. The patients were divided into cytokine storm group, excitotoxic brain damage group and unclassified encephalopathy group according to the the clinicopathological features and the imaging features. The clinical characteristics of each group were analyzed descriptively. Patients were divided into good prognosis group (≤2 scores) and poor prognosis group (>2 scores) based on the modified Rankin scale (mRS) score of the last follow-up. Fisher exact test or Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the two groups. Results: A total of 22 cases (12 females, 10 males) were included. The age of onset was 3.3 (1.7, 8.6) years. There were 11 cases (50%) with abnormal medical history, and 4 cases with abnormal family history. All the enrolled patients had fever as the initial clinical symptom, and 21 cases (95%) developed neurological symptoms within 24 hours after fever. The onset of neurological symptoms included convulsions (17 cases) and disturbance of consciousness (5 cases). There were 22 cases of encephalopathy, 20 cases of convulsions, 14 cases of speech disorders, 8 cases of involuntary movements and 3 cases of ataxia during the course of the disease. Clinical classification included 3 cases in the cytokine storm group, all with acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE); 9 cases in the excitotoxicity group, 8 cases with acute encephalopathy with biphasic seizures and late reduced diffusion (AESD) and 1 case with hemiconvulsion-hemiplegia syndrome; and 10 cases of unclassified encephalopathy. Laboratory studies revealed elevated glutathione transaminase in 9 cases, elevated glutamic alanine transaminase in 4 cases, elevated blood glucose in 3 cases, and elevated D-dimer in 3 cases. Serum ferritin was elevated in 3 of 5 cases, serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) neurofilament light chain protein was elevated in 5 of 9 cases, serum cytokines were elevated in 7 of 18 cases, and CSF cytokines were elevated in 7 of 8 cases. Cranial imaging abnormalities were noted in 18 cases, including bilateral symmetric lesions in 3 ANE cases and "bright tree appearance" in 8 AESD cases. All 22 cases received symptomatic treatment and immunotherapy (intravenous immunoglobulin or glucocorticosteroids), and 1 ANE patient received tocilizumab. The follow-up time was 50 (43, 53) d, and 10 patients had a good prognosis and 12 patients had a poor prognosis. No statistically significant differences were found between the two groups in terms of epidemiology, clinical manifestations, biochemical indices, and duration of illness to initiate immunotherapy (all P>0.05). Conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 infection is also a major cause of AE. AESD and ANE are the common AE syndromes. Therefore, it is crucial to identify AE patients with fever, convulsions, and impaired consciousness, and apply aggressive therapy as early as possible.
Subject(s)
Brain Diseases , COVID-19 , Child , Female , Male , Humans , Retrospective Studies , Cytokine Release Syndrome , COVID-19/complications , SARS-CoV-2 , Brain Diseases/diagnosis , Brain Diseases/etiology , Prognosis , Seizures , CytokinesABSTRACT
Learning outcomes: This case provides detailed information about digital technologies and business practices that may help offline retailers catch up with the trend of new retail. After studying the case and working on the assignment questions, students will be able to:▪ Understand new features of smart cash registers, including facial-recognition payment, purchase-sales-inventory management, customer profile and store management, which all are important for the long-term development of the retail business in the age of "new retail”.▪ Identify opportunities, practices and impacts of digital technologies, such as big data and artificial intelligence, on contemporary retail businesses.▪ Identify problems of traditional retail and suggest solutions by applying the concepts and tools learned above.▪ Apply digital marketing approaches and tools (e.g., social media, livestreaming and online word-of-mouth) to design marketing campaigns;students should include basic elements such as the 6Ms for effective marketing communications (market, mission, message, media, money and measure). Case overview/synopsis: This case describes difficult situations facing Leo Shoudong Pan, the founder and CEO of Yun Dong Jia Technologies Co Ltd (YDJ), in marketing communications. With a motto of "Making it easy to open stores anywhere”, YDJ develops and sells smart cash registers, which provide a self-developed operating system and cloud computing services. Pan targets small and micro retailers, who are technology laggards when digital transitions had swept the world. His goal is to build a network of 100,000 pieces of smart cash registers across China, but he has only sold 8,000 pieces since he founded YDJ in 2016. He must make a breakthrough in the business. To drive leads and sales, he feels the urgency of conducting effective marketing communications with target customers and enhance their understanding on the value that YDJ creates for them. Monetary incentives are tangible but not yet fully demonstrated YDJ's value. With the traditional retail approach, brick-and-mortar stores, especially those small-scaled ones, are not able to meet the market change;instead, they must adopt digital techniques to catch up with the trend of new retail, which is necessary for a long-term business development rather than just a temporary measure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pan must craft more compelling messages. What customer value should be chosen as incentives to motivate the target market? How to conduct effective marketing communications correspondingly? Complexity academic level: Senior undergraduate;Postgraduate;MBA;EMBA. Supplementary materials: Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code: CSS 8: Marketing. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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The unprecedented long-term online learning caused by COVID-19 has increased stress symptoms among students. The e-learning system reduces communications between teachers and students, making it difficult to observe student's mental issues and learning performance. This study aims to develop a non-intrusive method that can simultaneously monitor stress states and cognitive performance of student in the scenario of online education. Forty-three participants were recruited to perform a computer-based reading task under stressful and non-stressful conditions, and their eye-movement data were recorded. A tree ensemble machine learning model, named LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine), was utilized to predict stress states and reading performance of students with an accuracy of 0.825 and 0.793, respectively. An interpretable model, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation), was used to identify the most important eye-movement indicators and their effects on stress and reading performance. The proposed model can serve as a foundation for further development of user-centred services in e-learning system. © 2022 The authors and IOS Press.
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Background: The battle between human and COVID-19 since 2019, it is highly contagious and fatal disease with poor outcome in dialysis patients. The viral vector AZD1222 is a replication deficient simian adenovirus-vectored vaccine encoding the full length SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The efficacy and safety of AZD1222 in patients treated with peritoneal dialysis (PD) is still not knowing. We focused their seroresponse of nAb titers against SARS-CoV-2 and their local and systemic adverse effects. Method(s): We conducted this study to elucidate the immune response directed against SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein antigen and adverse effect to vaccination with AZD1222 in PD patients after their 1st and 2nd shots. There were 205 out of 263 PD patients received the first shot of AZD1222, and 192 of them had the second shot between June 2021 to Oct. 2021. Result(s): The first and second doses of AZD1222 vaccine 13 (9.1%) and 93 (65.0%) of 143 PD patients seroconverted with anti-SARS-CoV-2 S antibody titers (>= 50 U/mL), and titers presented with 188.54 U/mL (mean;IQR 54.7-739.6) and significantly increased to 1545.3 U/mL (mean ;IQR 52.0-38460), respectively. Pain was the most common local adverse event (AE) (75%). Systemic AEs occurring after the first dose were mostly fatigue (41%) and headache (31%). One severe AE were reported as hearing loss and stroke after the first injection. After the second dose, the most common systemic AEs were fatigue (40.5%), headache (22.5%), joint pain (20%), myalgia (17.5%) and fever (16%), but no severe AE reported. Patients with higher antibody titers after the first dose tended to have higher antibody titers after the second dose (p=1.23x10-4). Conclusion(s): Our study concludes that significantly increasing humoral responses to AZD1222 vaccination in PD patients are from 9.1% after 1st shot and 65% after 2nd shot. While acceptable local and systemic adverse events, viral vector AZD1222 is still safe and effective vaccination for PD patients.
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This study describes our proposed model design for SMM4H 2021 shared tasks. We fine-tune the language model of RoBERTa transformers and their connecting classifier to complete the classification tasks of tweets for adverse pregnancy outcomes (Task 4) and potential COVID-19 cases (Task 5). The evaluation metric is F1-score of the positive class for both tasks. For Task 4, our best score of 0.93 exceeded the median score of 0.925. For Task 5, our best of 0.75 exceeded the median score of 0.745. © 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Background: Geriatric patients with COVID-19 have had poor clinical outcomes globally, especially during the first wave of the pandemic. In Taiwan, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic occurred from May to July 2021. This retrospective study aimed to compare the characteristics and outcomes between geriatric and younger patients with COVID-19 infection. Methods: A total of 257 confirmed COVID-19 cases who were hospitalized from May to June 2021 were included. Their characteristics and outcomes, including in-hospital mortality, use of mechanical ventilation, and hospital stay, were collected for analysis. Results: There were 98 elderly patients (aged >= 65 years, median, 72.5 (interquartile range, 69.0-78.0) years) and 159 younger patients (aged < 65 years, median 55.0 (46.0-60.0) years). The elderly patients had a significantly higher Charlson comorbidity score (4.0 (3.0-5.0) vs. 1.0 (1.0-2.0), p < 0.001), and significantly higher D-dimer, procalcitonin, ferritin, and creatinine levels, but lower albumin level than the younger patients. The elderly group also had higher in-hospital mortality (7.1% vs. 1.9%, p < 0.05), were more likely to develop severe disease (83.7% vs. 67.9%, p < 0.01), and had a longer hospital stay (15.0 (11.0-23.0) vs. 12.0 (9.0-16.5) days, p < 0.001). Nevertheless, the elderly patients did not have a higher risk of using high-flow nasal cannulas (17.3% vs. 15.1%, p = 0.63) or mechanic ventilation (23.5% vs. 17.0%, p = 0.20). Conclusion: Elderly COVID-19 patients had significant higher risks of severe disease, mortality, and lon-ger duration of hospitalization, possible due higher rates of comorbidities and pro-inflammatory status. Copyright (c) 2022, Taiwan Society of Geriatric Emergency & Critical Care Medicine.
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Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can cause acute respiratory failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The prone position (PP) is widely used in patients with severe hypoxemia due to ARDS as it improves oxygenation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether improvements in gas exchange and lung mechanics with the PP were associated with survival in ventilated COVID-19 patients. Methods: Fourteen ventilated patients who were placed in the PP were included from May to June 2021. Clinical manifestations and lung mechanics parameters were collected. Results: The overall intensive care unit (ICU) mortality rate was 42.9%. Nonsurvivors were older (p = 0.014) and had higher Charlson comorbidity index (2.1 +/- 1.5 vs. 4.8 +/- 2.4, p = 0.035) and Sepsis-related Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) (3.3 +/- 1.0 vs. 7.3 +/- 3.5, p = 0.019) scores compared to survivors. There was no difference in PaO2/FiO(2) (P/F ratio) at baseline between the survivors and nonsurvivors. The improvement in P/F ratio (p = 0.0037) and reduction in driving pressure (Pdrive) (p = 0.046) on the second day after first PP were correlated with lower mortality. Significant predictors of successfully stopping prone treatment included a reduction in Pdrive at the first hour, lower tidal volume (Vt) at the fourth hour, and P/F ratio improvement on the second day after PP. Conclusion: Improvement in P/F ratio and reduction in driving pressure on the second day after PP were correlated with reduced mortality. Three parameters could predict successful resumption of the supine position. Copyright (c) 2022, Taiwan Society of Geriatric Emergency & Critical Care Medicine.
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Objective: The objectives of this study were to measure the global impact of the pandemic on the volumes for intravenous thrombolysis (IVT), IVT transfers, and stroke hospitalizations over 4 months at the height of the pandemic (March 1 to June 30, 2020) compared with two control 4-month periods. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread repercussions on the delivery of health care worldwide. Design/Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, observational, retrospective study across 6 continents, 70 countries, and 457 stroke centers. Diagnoses were identified by ICD-10 codes and/or classifications in stroke center databases. Results: There were 91,373 stroke admissions in the 4 months immediately before compared to 80,894 admissions during the pandemic months, representing an 11.5% (95%CI,-11.7 to-11.3, p<0.0001) decline. There were 13,334 IVT therapies in the 4 months preceding compared to 11,570 procedures during the pandemic, representing a 13.2% (95%CI,-13.8 to-12.7, p<0.0001) drop. Interfacility IVT transfers decreased from 1,337 to 1,178, or an 11.9% decrease (95%CI,-13.7 to-10.3, p=0.001). There were greater declines in primary compared to comprehensive stroke centers (CSC) for stroke hospitalizations (-17.3% vs-10.3%, p<0.0001) and IVT (-15.5% vs-12.6%, p=0.0001). Recovery of stroke hospitalization volume (9.5%, 95%CI 9.2-9.8, p<0.0001) was noted over the two later (May, June) versus the two earlier (March, April) months of the pandemic, with greater recovery in hospitals with lower COVID-19 hospitalization volume, high volume stroke center, and CSC. There was a 1.48% stroke rate across 119,967 COVID-19 hospitalizations. SARS-CoV-2 infection was noted in 3.3% (1,722/52,026) of all stroke admissions. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a global decline in the volume of stroke hospitalizations, IVT, and interfacility IVT transfers. Primary stroke centers and centers with higher COVID19 inpatient volumes experienced steeper declines. Recovery of stroke hospitalization was noted in the later pandemic months, with greater recovery in hospitals with lower COVID-19 hospitalizations, high volume stroke centers, and CSCs.
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In 2019, the entire world was under the panic and threat of rapid spread of “COVID-19” virus. Especially, the global social structure pattern was changed. At the same time, traditional Eastern culture attaches great importance to table etiquette and eating together around the table. With the transformation of social lifestyle and structure, more and more people must start to face the situation of being alone or the mentality of dining alone in a restaurant. This research uses the theory of cultural probes to study the post-COVID-19 period, during which consumers stay alone in the restaurant and generate daily context and behavior patterns. Its research method adopts the role of “first-person perspective”, combined with the context of “modeling feature track”. Based on the cultural probe toolkit, this research obtains information for integrated research and simulation test verification. In the experimental testing phase, participants designed the user experience for the product’s real-time “design interactive mode” and “personal space experience” through interviews, taking photos for record and writing mood logs, and created a new interactive design framework. The theme of this research is “The Interactive Mode and User Experience of Alone Dining Space during the Post-Covid-19 Period from the Perspective of Cultural Probes”. It conducts research and draws conclusions based on the cultural probe theory and provides an innovative model that focuses on the interactive design relationship between people and products, supplemented by product appearance molding design. The name of the design work is “Intelligent Partition Plate System Product”. It aims to establish a new type of human-computer interaction communication framework mode, so as to meet the future interactive behavior of alone dining space in the post-COVID-19 era and enhance the overall user experience. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of integrating meaning-centered positive education (MCPE) and the second wave positive psychology (PP2.0) into a university English speaking class. The study adopted Wong’s CasMac model of PP2.0 and designed a series of English lessons which aimed to understand the meaning of life through the perspectives of PP2.0 and its focus on MCPE. The participants were 38 university students, with upper-intermediate English proficiency, enrolled in an English speaking class. They participated in the English program for 15 weeks and 2 h each week. The quantitative data was collected from survey of the CasMac Measure of Character and analyzed with the paired t-test method, and the qualitative data analysis was collected from students’ weekly learning sheets and journals. The results show that the integration of MCPE and PP2.0 in a university English class is feasible to enhance students’ understanding of mature happiness through the CasMac model and to promote their meanings in life. According to the research findings, it is suggested that the CasMac model can be applied to other fields or other groups who need help to enhance life meaning and improve wellbeing. Particularly under the pandemic of COVID-19, there are people encountering traumas, losses, and sorrows and it is crucial to transform sufferings with the support of approaching mature happiness. © Copyright © 2021 Chen, Chang and Wu.
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This study aims to explore the English learning achievement, learning attitudes, perceptions, and challenges faced by college students experiencing both synchronous and asynchronous distance English teaching in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021, Contemporary Educational Research Quarterly. All Rights Reserved.
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Transmembrane serine protease (TMPRSS2) plays an oncogenic role in prostate cancer as the fusion gene with ERG, and has also been demonstrated to be essential for the cellular entry of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronaviruses (SARS-CoV). Thus, targeting TMPRSS2 is a promising strategy for therapies against both prostate cancer and coronavirus infection. Although Nafamostat and Camostat have been identified as TMPRSS2 inhibitors, severe side effects such as cerebral hemorrhage, anaphylactoid reaction, and cardiac arrest shock greatly hamper their clinical use. Therefore, more potent and safer drugs against this serine protease should be further developed. In this study, we developed a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based platform for effectively screening of inhibitors against TMPRSS2 protease activity. The disruption of FRET between green and red fluorescent proteins conjugated with the substrate peptide, which corresponds to the cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, was measured to determine the enzymatic activity of TMPRSS2. Through an initiate pilot screening with around 100 compounds, Flupirtine, a selective neuronal potassium channel opener, was identified as a potential TMPRSS2 inhibitor from an FDA-approved drug library by using this screening platform, and showed inhibitory effect on the TMPRSS-dependent infection of SARS-CoV-2 Spike-pseudotyped lentiviral particles. This study describes a platform proven effective for rapidly screening of TMPRSS2 inhibitors, and suggests that Flupirtine may be worthy of further consideration of repurposing to treat COVID-19 patients.
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Taiwan had been using many important public health management strategies to beat Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) without a lockdown. Mask wearing by the general public was thought to be the major factor for the success of Taiwan to stop the spread of COVID-19. We share our experience in Taiwan as an example for other countries to safely reopen from a lockdown.