ABSTRACT
Despite the rapid development and spread of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) during the past four decades, which has become a prominent feature of the era, Iraq is still at the bottom of the list of developing countries, especially in the field of technology and communication by all standards. In fact, Iraq lies outside the scope of education quality alongside other six Arab countries. This, however, is attributed to the constant mis-management and lack of knowledge about issues relevant to the modes of technology development. What makes things worse is the outbreak and rapid spread of Covid-19. This, so to speak, has imposed a number of restrictions on education to the extent that the government has resorted to E-Learning. The researchers, however, briefly address the concept of (ICT) as well as the global technological diffusion indicator for the Arab group in which Iraq's position is analysed according to the main and sub-indicators. Moreover, the E-Learning, its advantages and disadvantages, is being brought into focus. To amend all the obstacles, solutions have been proposed in accordance with the general technological indicator. Besides, the research-paper concludes with recommendations and suggestions which will definitely contribute to the attainment of the goal aspired for. © 2023 Author(s).
ABSTRACT
Building lifts are among the most-Touched surfaces in a multi-Tenant office.Covid-19 pandemic forces certain types of buildings to be provided with a level of health and safety protection measures which can avoid spread of the contagious diseases. Touchless technologies may be beneficial in the case of virus transmission through surfaces that regularly come into contact with infected people. People would be able to prevent unwanted interaction with polluted surfaces using keycard swiping, voice control, or face recognition technologies. The work herein is called a 'Handless Elevator', where it is considering a touchless elevator controlling system.The study has been implemented with mobile application part and microcontroller as the core of the hardware part. Users are expected to operate the elevator without any special training, and its functioning must be comparable to that of regular elevators. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has changed many aspects of people's lives, including education. The pandemic impacted schools, undergraduate, and graduate university education worldwide. Some educational institutions have moved to distance learning to prevent students and their families from getting infected, whereas others have face-To-face examinations to ensure students' integrity. However, paper-based exams are more likely to increase the virus's risk. From another perspective, the tremendous sums of papers used during exam preparation contribute significantly to paper waste. Existing proctoring solutions include learning management software or required additional hardware and software setup. In this paper, we propose a mobile application that facilitates the contactless submission of paper-based exams. The app is designed to be a medium where students can view exam questions and write down their solutions on their sheets of paper while in a proctored setting. Instructors can create exams, grade them, and monitor students through the app. The app consists of a cheating detection feature that constantly monitors app switches and network disconnects during test-Taking to combat any cheating attempts. Once the exam is over, instructors are provided with the ability to view a list of students' activities before submission. Once cleared, students can scan their solutions and upload them for grading. Our results show that the proposed tool is low-cost, user-friendly, and reliable and can be used to conduct exams in a safe and healthy environment. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Over the past two years, COVID-19 has led to and is still leading to lots of deaths to date. Many industries have been affected by that, and governments have united in finding ways to mitigate the spread of the disease, thus leading life to return to normal. There are several ways that were followed to do that, such as social distancing, thermal screening, and virtual communication. Thermal screening has proven its practicality in certain entities that require face-to-face contact. Researchers have been contributing to finding effective ways to develop screening methods to help re-accelerate the learning process. This paper proposes a fever screening system to record and track individuals' temperature and an attendance tracking system for educational institutions. The system measures the individual's temperature and records it, and saves their attendance in a database. After completing the measurement taking of an individual, the system uses a buzzer to inform the following individual that it is their turn. This allows the institution to monitor any temperature spikes among the individuals while recording their attendance without close contact at the entrance. Our results validate the usefulness and potential of our system as a fever screening and attendance tracking tool. It also opens the door for further development, allowing regular operation in educational institutions during any upcoming pandemics. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The alarming spread of COVID-19 has caused significant social, economic, and commercial changes globally and has altered education. It highlighted the significance of an alternative education model that maintains health and safety during pandemics without disrupting learning. With this rapid transition to distance learning, it became fundamental to ensure the reliability of academic results is maintained through an online exam proctoring tool, providing user authentication, and examinees' monitoring, while ensuring maximum student convenience. In this paper, we propose an AI-powered proctoring system that adequately detects and reports academic malpractice and tackles the most significant distance learning deficiency, which is verifying the online learner's identity. The proposed solution is based on a computing unit equipped with an HD camera running computer vision pipelines that uses the student identification details for user authentication. The system aims to eliminate the possibility of running into technical problems while maintaining minimal human intervention. Hence, it offers a reliable, low-cost, user-friendly solution that saves time and resources. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In this research, we aim to use the underused power generation method of piezoelectricity and apply it to supply energy to other low-powered quality-of-life devices that are practical and helpful. Harnessing and harvesting the energy from piezoelectric material is done by aligning small piezo elements in a rectangular shape and incorporating them into an object commonly exposed to mechanical strain change. This research is about developing a doormat that will generate energy to charge a battery and keep it charged while it supplies power to a people sensor device. This project's function is to limit the number of people existing in a store or facility to minimize and stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The piezoelectric doormat will reduce phase errors, voltage drops across components and evenly distributes applied mechanical pressure among the piezoelectric elements in the doormat. The efficiency of this doormat will encourage users to put it to practical use in many different fields across different locations for various purposes. It will be easy to implement with other devices and systems and will have good mobility, supplying them with sufficient power and efficiency for extended periods, and will surely help the UAE become an even safer place during the world-spread pandemic.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, the coronavirus pandemic has caused and continues to cause a large number of deaths today. Governments all over the world have taken measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Home quarantine was proven to be a successful way to control and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The current methods of tracking home-quarantined people use tracking bracelets or mobile applications, which are still in their early development stage. In this paper, we propose a quarantine tracking system to track users during their quarantine period. The system consists of a web portal designed for the concerned authorities and the quarantined user's mobile application. The proposed application randomly prompts users to verify their quarantine by uploading their selfies. We verify the user's quarantine status through an automatic location and selfie verification. Our system provides a specific set of features that can be set by the concerned authorities, such as the frequency of prompts and the allowed response time. Violation reports can also be accessed by the concerned authorities to keep track of quarantined users' violations. Our results validate the usefulness and potential of our system as a quarantine tracking tool. It also opens the door for further development, allowing governments to handle any upcoming pandemics. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we propose a contactless IoT elevator control system to decrease the risk of coronavirus transmission whilst using an elevator. Our system is based on a mobile application and an IoT control panel of linear actuators. The system provides the user with a simulated elevator panel through the proposed mobile application allowing the user to register external and internal calls to the elevator without physical contact with the controls. Each elevator connected to the system has a unique QR code. The user uses the mobile application which is connected to our server to scan the QR code. Once the desired elevator is identified, the application displays a simulated elevator panel and registers the calls of the user. Registered calls are used to operate IoT control panels attached to the elevator's internal and external panels allowing the user to request an elevator and select the destination floor without having to touch any potentially contaminated button. Alternatively, our IoT control panels can be operated by issuing a voice command to the user's mobile phone specifying the desired direction and floor. We created a database of voice commands to test our voice recognition accuracy with over 25 testing records of users from different age groups, gender, and countries. Our system reported an accuracy ranging between 92 to 100% for the floor levels and 96% and 100% for the open and close commands, respectively. The emergency command was recognized without errors. Our results show that our system can be an effective tool in limiting the COVID-19 cross-infection from interacting with elevator buttons. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
ABSTRACT
Due to the COVID19 pandemic, contact tracing and moving object tracking are gaining more popularity in automated video surveillance systems in computer vision and video processing. The application of contact tracing and moving object tracking is critical in applying pandemic control measures and is getting more important day by day. This work proposes a computer vision-based algorithm for contact tracing using stationary surveillance cameras. The input videos are converted into a bird's eye view where all moving objects are detected, and the distances between them are calculated. The algorithm performs background subtraction to isolate foreground objects, morphological operations to remove the noise, and blob analysis to identify the connected regions in the resulting foreground video. Kalman filters to estimate objects' motion in the video calculates Euclidean distance between the objects to trace object contacts. This algorithm can be utilized in almost all public places such as shopping malls, airport terminals, and educational institutions. It allows identifying, assessing, and managing people who might have been exposed to the disease. The testing data was collected in a home environment, and the stationary camera was replaced with a mobile phone camera fixed on a tripod. The work was implemented and tested, and the results verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The system was able to detect the objects in the input video frame and estimate the distance between them across multiple cameras. © 2020 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Social distancing is a necessary precaution measure taken in order to have more control over the outbreak of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Most of Social distancing monitoring approaches are based on Bluetooth and mobile phones that require an app to be downloaded on all phones. This paper proposes a different approach to monitor social distancing, using cameras, and combining different computer vision algorithms. The approach utilizes the concept of inverse perspective mapping (IPM) together with the camera's intrinsic information to produce a bird's eye view with real-world coordinates of the frame being processed from a video source. The process starts with image enhancement, foreground detection using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) background subtraction, tracking using Kalman filter, computing real-world distance measurements between individuals, and detecting those who have been in less than 2 meters apart as they are considered to be in contact. This tool could assist the efforts of the governments to contain the virus. It can be implemented in closed areas or institutions, monitor the extent of people's commitment, and provide analysis and a faster approach to detect possibly corona suspicion cases. The approach is tested on the task decomposition data set, which included frames of closed areas and the camera's intrinsic parameters. Another data set was created with different scenarios to increase the confidence level of our algorithm. The results showed the success of our approach in detecting the violation in social distancing with accurate measures of the real-world coordinates. © 2020 IEEE.