The Use of Metaverse in the Healthcare Sector: Analysis and Applications

With the use of blockchain, Internet of Things, virtual platform/telecommunications network, artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution, the essential demand for digital transition within the health care settings has increased as an outcome of the 2019 coronavirus illness outbreak and the fourth industrial revolution. The evolution of virtual environments with three-dimensional (3D) spaces and avatars, known as metaverse, has slowly gained acceptance in the field of health care. These environments may be especially useful for patient-facing platforms (such as platforms for telemedicine), functional uses (such as meeting management), digital education (such as modeled medical and surgical learning), treatments and diagnoses. This chapter offers the most recent state-of-the-art metaverse services and applications and a growing problem when it comes to using it in the healthcare sector. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Presentation, management, and outcome of COVID-19 among patients with cancer in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region

Background: Patients with cancer are vulnerable population that suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic from SARS-CoV-2 infection and from the pandemic's impact on healthcare systems. We are presenting the findings of MENA Registry for COVID-19 and Cancer (MRCC) regarding the SARS-CoV-2 infection presentation, diagnosis, treatment, complications, and outcomes. Methods: MRCC was adapted from ASCO COVID-19 Registry and included patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection and underlying cancer diagnosis including a newly diagnosed cancer in the work-up phase or patients with active cancer receiving cancer therapy or supportive care, or within first year of adjuvant chemotherapy or after one year of curative therapy and receiving hormonal therapy. Registry included data on patients from 12 centers in eight countries in the MENA region, namely: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, and Morocco. The data included patient and disease characteristics, COVID-19 presentation, management, and outcomes. The follow up is differential as data get captured at different points of disease trajectory for each patient which may not reflect the final outcome. Results: Data on 1345 patients were captured in the study by December 7, 2021. Median age was 57.1 years (18-98), whereas 56.1% were females. The median follow-up was 98.5 days (0-554). The most common COVID-19 symptoms was fever (50.3%) and 26.8% of patients were asymptomatic. Out of the 959 patients with complete data on hospitalization, 554 (57.8%) were hospitalized and 126 of them (22.7%) were admitted to intensive care unit (ICU). The majority of hospitalized patients (60%) had respiratory complications and 13.9% had sepsis and 8.5% suffered acute renal injury. As shown in Table, more than quarter of the patients died with 47% of death from COVID-19 or related complication and 60.6% died at home. More than half of the patients were fully recovered from infection. Conclusions: Although more than half of the patients recovered form COVID-19 and more are expected to recover with a longer follow up, the death toll and complications remain high in this patient population. Future analysis of the impact of vaccination and better disease management as well as the impact of newer variants would provide a useful insight on managing this vulnerable population.

The Fear of COVID-19 Pandemic in Triggering Tourists' Material Deprivation, Social Rights, Social Participation, and Cultural Integration: The Mediating Role of Bullying

The paper investigated the impact of the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourists' social exclusion in terms of material deprivation, social rights, social participation, and cultural/normative integration, through the mediating role of bullying, in the early days of COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on social exclusion theory, we adopted a quantitative approach and an integrative model to collect data from 473 tourists through a web-based survey from 5th March to 17th June 2020. The results demonstrated that the fear of COVID-19 has a significant influence on tourists' social exclusion, and in turn, has led to bullying. Besides, bullying has a significant influence on material deprivation, social rights, social participation, and cultural/normative integration of social participation. In addition, this study determined that the effect of the fear of COVID-19 on tourists' social exclusion is partially mediated by bullying. This study also draws attention to the importance of upholding the values of humanity and positive human transactions in times of crisis and pandemics. © 2021 AJHTL. All Rights Reserved.

Clearing the air about airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has created the current pandemic, has caused a worldwide worry. Different countries have since enforced varying levels of lockdowns and guidelines for their populations to follow in a serious effort to mitigate the spread. Up until recently, the majority of these regulations and policies were established on the assumption that the dominant routes of transmission of this virus are through droplets and fomite contact. However, there is now a substantial amount of research pointing towards the strong possibility that SARS-CoV-2 can spread through airborne means. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have recently recognized this, which poses the question of whether our collective methods of lessening transmission risk and keeping people safe have been sufficient. This paper is a comprehensive review of the evidence on SARS-CoV-2 being an airborne disease, through different epidemiological, experimental, and animal-model based published research. Studies opposing this evidence have also been discussed. The majority of these studies are favoring the high plausibility of SARS-CoV-2 aerosol transmission, and therefore the many implications of aerosol transmission have been discussed in this paper to suggest effective mitigation and control strategies.

The correlation between human lifestyle, weather, smart technologies and COVID-19 pandemic

The SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has caused numerous deaths and injuries globally, striking all communities. Till this moment, a health hazard will be continued for years. The outbreak is a chance for the polity to reevaluate the use of housing, transportation, social housing in helping individuals, especially susceptible people, and extra green public spaces to support a healthier atmosphere that will define how differences outline the exposure, susceptibility;besides, the risk and consequence of infectious diseases. Increasing community and environmental vulnerabilities will be accompanied by COVID-19 that drastically increased the infection risk and death. During COVID-19, emerging technology such as drones and smart transportation can play a crucial role in fighting this virus. Besides, there is an impact of climate change on the spreading of COVID-19. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Artificial intelligence for sustainable waste management and control during and post COVID-19 crisis: Critical challenges

COVID-19 swept the world. The total number of infected people has risen from 5 M in March 2020 to over 22 M in August 2020 and is increasing, which at the current stage does not seem to reach its peak. It has led to waste generation and various phases of waste management practice issues. The impacts include changes in the quantity of waste, composition, timing/frequency (temporal), distribution (spatial), and risk, which affect handling practices and care. So, the global dynamics of waste generation have changed, and special attention has therefore been required. The unexpected variations in the composition and amount of waste often need policymakers to react dynamically. This study underlines the challenges faced by the solid waste management sector during the pandemic and the prospects underlying the framework to resolve current lacunae. The study describes particular pharmaceutical waste cases, plastic waste, and food waste management, which were all a cause for great concern during this crisis. The combination of virus-packed biomedical waste with normal solid waste sources presents major negative protection and health challenges for sanitation employees without active citizen involvement and collaboration. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

The role of internet of Medicalc in monitoring the environmental impact of COVID-19

COVID-19 (Corona Virus disease 2019) is the highest spreading virus around the world. October 2020, more than 30 Million around the world are infected by this virus. A rising number of infected people number with disease’s reasons the incapability challenge for totally caring in healthcare centers and afflict many physicians and healthcare members inside the hospitals. So, healthcare does not reach all infected patients. So, there is a deep need to guarantee suitable healthcare for patients remotely and save their lives. Monitoring patients in healthcare centers is considered the most significant medicinal situation. This process is an infectious cause of thousands of healthcare workers, so there is a high requirement for remote monitoring. On another side, less critical patient’s side, this system permits observers, doctors, and nurses to monitor patients and acquire healthcare from patient’s homes to keep places for the crucial situations in hospitals. To save the Individual’s lives by improving health services from infection. The smart application monitors the infected people who rely on several devices to register their patients’ properties every second. This paper presents a review study of the importance of Internet-of-things in smart health applications. It also shows the beneficial roles in providing medical issues for infected patients remotely based on monitoring electronic Quarantine (E- Quarantine) remotely. It benefits sensory big data interpretation to support physicians in patients’ diagnosis via the Internet. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Tracking of COVID-19 geographical infections on real-time tweets

Coronavirus COVID-19 is a global pandemic stated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020. The COVID-19 devastating impact was not only affect human life but also many aspects of it such as social interaction, transportation options, personal saving and expenses, and more. The power of social media data in such world pandemic outbreaks provides an efficient source of tracking, raising awareness, and alerts with potentials infection location. Social networks can fight the pandemic by sharing helpful content and statistics based on demographics features of users around the world. There is an urgent need for such frameworks for tracking helpful content, detecting misleading content, ranking the trusted user content, presenting accurate demographics statistics of the outbreak. In this paper, the real-time tweets of Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) analysis will be presented. The proposed framework will be used to track the geographical infections, trends of the content, and the user’s categorization. The framework will include analysis, demographics features, statistical charts, classifying the content of tweets related to its usefulness. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated based on different measures such as classification accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Finally, a set of recommendations will be presented to benefit from the proposed framework with its full potentials as a tool to stand against the COVID-19 spreading. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Blockchain use cases for COVID-19: management, surveillance, tracking and security

Blockchain has become a key technology in building and managing healthcare systems. the distinguished attributes of the blockchain (e.g. security, decentralization, time stamping, and transparency) make it the best technology for managing COVID-19 pandemic in real-time. This chapter investigates five blockchain use cases for fighting against the COVID-19 virus spread. Finally, this chapter is ended with discussing the recent blockchain platforms that can be utilized for Managing epidemic diseases, HashLog, and XMED Chain. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The truth about 5G and COVID-19: basics, analysis, and opportunities

5G is a paradigm shift for data transfer and wireless communication technology where 5G involves massive bandwidths based on high carrier frequencies. Unlike 4G, 5G is highly integrative to produce a seamless user experience and universal high-rate coverage. The key role of 5G is increasing data capacity, improving data rate transfer, providing better service quality, and decreasing latency. Recently, COVID-19 is declared as an international epidemic. More than 4.5 million confirmed cases and +308,000 death cases have been recorded around more than 209 countries on 16th May 2020. There are several insane theories about 5G technology and human health. Therefore, people are burning valuable 5G infrastructure down out of fear for their health. People think that 5G towers are weakening the immune system and causing the global COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter reviews the data transmission revolution from 1G to 5G technology and discusses the impact of 5G technology on human health, pandemic, and business perspectives. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The future scope of internet of things for monitoring and prediction of COVID-19 patients

The new outbreak of pneumonia triggered by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) poses a major threat and has been declared a global public health emergency. This outbreak had first been discovered in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and until now has spread to the world. Emerging technology such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor networks (SN) have been utilized widely in our everyday lives in a diversity of ways. IoT has also been an instrumental role in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic currently out breaking across the globe, where it plays a significant role in tracking COVID-19 patients and infected people in hospitals and hotspots. This paper exhibited a survey of IoT technologies used in the fight against the deadly COVID-19 outbreak in different applications and discusses the key roles of IoT science in this unparalleled war. Research directions on discovering IoT’s potentials, improving its capabilities and power in the battle, and IoT’s issues and problems in healthcare systems are explored in detail. This study is intended to provide an overview of the current status of IoT applications to IoT researchers and the broader community and to inspire researchers to leverage IoT potentials in the battle against COVID-19. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The 4th industrial revolution in coronavirus pandemic ERA

The global prevalence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) requires a remarkable avenue to endure and restrain it;Although the most advanced and sophisticated healthcare systems around the world could not stand against this pandemic, the synthesis of the fourth industrial revolution manifests its potential to eradicate this virus. This chapter discusses how multiple advanced technologies involve diverse perspectives of fighting the catastrophe, starting from reduction of the spreading of the virus, automated surveillance for infected cases, contribution to retaining the communication as well as social safety during the lockdown, and evolving healthcare medical equipment to the process of developing a vaccine. It also has a vital role in keeping most nations’ institutions run remotely, such as education systems, besides the declination of the expected economic losses by running businesses online. Moreover, introducing the essential role of these technologies to monitor the propagation of COVID-19 globally that permits taking precautionary measures earlier and evaluating the current situation of each country individually. Eventually, the influence of these privileges of this revolution and how it has convinced other nations the importance of accelerating and boosting those advanced technologies to defeat the current situation by considering China as a realistic illustration of the efficiency. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The role of social robotics to combat COVID-19 pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic grows, the shortening of clinical hardware is expanding. A key bit of hardware getting out of sight has been ventilators. The contrast among the organic market is significant to be dealt with ordinary creation strategies, particularly under social removing measures set up. The examination investigates the method of reasoning of human-robot groups to increase creation utilizing preferences of both the simplicity of coordination and keeping up social removing. This chapter highlights the role of social robotic in fighting COVID-19. Also, it presents the requirements of social robotics. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

3D printing supports COVID-19 pandemic control

At the end of December last year a new type of coronavirus has appeared in Wuhan, China, with new properties the researchers named it COVID-19. In February, the world health organization considers it a world pandemic;it had spread in most world countries. This virus attacks the respiratory system, which makes failure in the system’s function. The effect of this crisis touched all the fields life, where all countries applied quarantine and roadblock that makes a real shortage in most of the ple needs. Besides biological scientists’ efforts, the computer scientists proposed many ideas to fight this epidemic using emergent technologies. This chapter is covering 3D printing principals the latest efforts against COVID-19 as one of the emergent technologies. 3D printing technology helps to flatten the curve of the outbreak of the virus by reducing the effect of shortage in the supply chain of medical parts and all personal protective equipment (PPE) (i.e. face masks and goggles), where it provides the extensive customization capability. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Monitoring COVID-19 disease using big data and artificial intelligence-driven tools

With the daily huge growth in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, COVID-19 extremely threatens public health, countries’ economic, social life, and the international relations around the world. The accurate diagnosis based on a huge amount of data has become a serious issue that effect the disease control, especially in the widespread countries. To monitor COVID-19, big data analytics tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques play a significant role in many aspects. The integration between both technologies will help healthcare workers for early and accurately diagnose COVID-19 cases. In addition, the strategic planning for crisis management is supported by aggregation of big data to be use in the epidemiologic directions. Moreover, AI and big data driven tools presents visualization for COVID-19 outbreak information that help in detecting risk allocation and regional transmissions. In this chapter, a review of recent works related to COVID-19 containment using AI and big data techniques is introduced, showing their main findings and limitations to make it easy for researchers to investigate new techniques that will help in COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Deep learning technology for tackling COVID-19 pandemic

Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand, researchers around the world are working to understand, diminish, and curtail its spread. The primary fields of research include investigating transmission of COVID-19, promoting its identification, designing potential vaccines and therapies, and recognizing the pandemic’s socio-economic impacts. Deep Learning (DL), which uses either deep learning architectures or hierarchical approaches to learning, is developed a machine learning class since 2006. The exponential growth and availability of data and groundbreaking developments in hardware technology have led to the rise of new distributed and learning studies. Throughout this chapter, we discuss how deep learning can contribute to these goals by stepping up ongoing research activities, improving the efficiency and speed of existing methods, and proposing original lines of research. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Classification of COVID19 X-ray images based on transfer learning INCEPTIONV3 deep learning model

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently announced the novel coronavirus 2019 as a pandemic. Many preventative plans and non-pharmaceutical efforts have emerged and been in use to manage and control the spread of the disease which includes infection control, proper isolation of patients, and social distancing. The main test used to confirm a COVID-19 case is the RT-PCR test. However, this approach needs analysis time and specimen collection. Therefore, the importance of medical imaging is increased to screen COVID-19 cases. Hence radiology has a pivotal role in managing COVID-19 infection using CT scans and chest X-ray (CXR) throughout the screening, diagnosis, and prognostication processes of the disease. In this paper, a new model using the transfer learning method and InceptionV3 algorithm has been presented to classify the X-ray images into COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia classes. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieved 98% Accuracy on the test set for classifying the images from the 3 different classes. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Sakha: an artificial intelligence enabled visualbot for health and mental wellbeing during COVID’19 pandemic

COVID19 pandemic is playing havoc all around the world. Though the world is fighting this invisible enemy it has succumbed to the devastating potential of the Coronavirus. Largest of world economies and developed nations have been exposed and their health infrastructure has collapsed during this testing time. It is assessed and predicted that the novel coronavirus which is responsible for COVID19 pandemic, may turn into an endemic (just like HIV) and will never go away. It will become part and parcel of our life and humans have to learn to live with it even if the vaccine is developed. The government’s world over is concerned with containment and eradication of this virus at the earliest and massive efforts are on at all front to contain it’s spread. As of now (3rd week of May 2020), more than 4.4 million cases of the disease have been recorded worldwide and more than 300,000 have died. The world has also seen technological innovation during this time and mechanisms to tackle COVID19 patients. Innovations in carrying out quick testing using Rapid testing kits, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered thermal scanning for temperature monitoring in the crowd, AI-enabled contact tracing, Mobile Apps, low-cost ventilators, and many other such similar solutions. All these pertain to checking for COVID19 symptoms and taking actions thereafter, but what about the stress, pain, and shock of a person who has been put under quarantine in a facility meant for the purpose or the person who is Corona positive? In this chapter, the authors have discussed briefly the pandemic and tried to provide a solution for the mental wellbeing of such people who are under quarantine and are isolated but heavily stressed or showing stress symptoms, by creating a VisualBOT which could understand the facial expression of the person and judge his mood, for providing suitable counseling and help. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.