COVID-Beat: a low-cost breath monitoring approach for people in quarantine during the pandemic

Due to COVID-19, people have to adapt to the new lifestyle until scientists develop a permanent solution for this pandemic. Monitoring the respiration rate is very important for a COVID-infected person because the Coronavirus infects the pulmonary system of the person. Two problems that arise while monitoring the breath rate are: sensors are contact based and expensive for mass deployment. A conventional wearable breath rate monitoring system burdens the COVID-affected patient and exposes the caregivers to possible transmission. A contactless low-cost breath monitoring system is required, which monitors and records the breath rate continuously. This paper proposes a breath rate monitoring system called COVID-Beat, a wireless, low-cost, and contactless Wi-Fi-based continuous breath monitoring system. This sensor is developed using off-the-shelf commonly available embedded Internet of Thing device ESP32, and the performance is validated by conducting extensive experimentation. The breath rate is estimated by extracting the channel state information of the subcarriers. The system estimates the breath rate with a maximum accuracy of 99% and a minimum accuracy of 91%, achieved by advanced subcarrier selection and fusion method. The experimental results show superior performance over the existing breath rate monitoring technologies.

Analysis of COVID-19 vaccination progress using machine learning approach

The past two decades were marked with the outbreaks of many viral diseases such as Chikungunya, Ebola, Zika, Nipah, H7N9 Bird flu, H1N1, SARS and MERS. With a new disease outbreak, the world awoke to this decade. A new Coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019. The majority of the patients who were initially discovered were connected to the 'wet market', a location a location where live animals are treated and sold. The market could have served as a source of amplification from which the virus began to spread to many other areas of China and, eventually, to 213 nations and territories in a very short period of time. On 11 February 2020, The WHO is the World Health Organization dubbed this disease 'COVID-19,' which is an abbreviation for Coronavirus Disease 2019. © 2022 Author(s).

Exploring the Differential Effects of Religious and Spiritual Cues in Online Advertising: A Study of US Christians and the Nonreligious during COVID-19

During times of distress, people tend to seek religious or spiritual guidance as a coping mechanism. COVID-19 brought much uncertainty into the lives of people across the world, providing a unique window into the various constructs and individual preferences related to religion and spirituality. While previous findings focus on the importance of religious cues and religiosity in advertising, scholars have not paid much attention to spirituality. A growing number of Americans do not identify with any religion, and studies about the nonreligious, especially atheists and agnostics, are relatively scant. Therefore, the aim of the current study, grounded in congruity theory and cue utilization theory, was to align ad orientation (religious versus spiritual) with individual life orientation (religious versus nonreligious) to explore the impact of these relationships on advertising effectiveness. Findings show that Christians had strong and favorable attitudes toward both the religious and spiritual ads but stronger intention to learn more about the brand only after exposure to the religious ad. In contrast, nonreligious participants had significantly more favorable attitudes and higher intention after exposure to the spiritual ad (versus religious ad). These findings contribute to an initial theoretical understanding of these two groups, with important implications for advertisers.

Scleredema adultorum of Buschke associated with hypothyroidism and liver cirrhosis.

Scleredema adultorum of Buschke is a rare disorder of the connective tissue, involving the skin. Here, we present a 61-year-old male, who is a known case of compensated liver cirrhosis with a past history of being treated for autoimmune thyrotoxicosis, who presented with complaints of alopecia, skin tightening, dry skin, pruritus, and woody indurated plaques on the skin of the upper back, shoulder, and arms. Skin biopsy of the arm revealed the characteristic features of scleredema. He was extensively evaluated for known literature-cited causes of scleredema, and the work up revealed a negative result. He was also found to be hypothyroid on presentation. Hence, we present a case of scleredema occurring in a patient with hypothyroidism and chronic liver disease, which to our knowledge is being described for the first time in literature.