ABSTRACT
Objectives: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was diverse and disproportionate among nations and population segments. The impacts of the disease and the containment strategies adopted are broad and cut across multiple facets of life, society, and the economy, which are intimately interlinked. To ascertain the socioeconomic impact and human behavior changes due to the pandemic and the containment strategies adopted a large household survey was conducted covering all the provinces in Sri Lanka. Data description: We conducted a cross-sectional Household survey covering all 9 provinces, including 20 districts in Sri Lanka from August 2021 to September 2021. This dataset consists of the data collected from 3020 households, on the impact of the pandemic through three distinctly identified pandemic waves in Sri Lanka. The questionnaire was designed to capture COVID-19 impact in 2 primary sections (socioeconomic impact and behavioral impact) which were further divided into 8 sub-sections: educational impact, impact on mobility, access to health services, economic impact, human interactions, food consumption, religious and cultural, and psychological impact. This dataset will enable researchers and policymakers to analyze the impact of the pandemic through a multifaceted perspective enabling a more holistic approach to decision-making.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Tooth, ImpactedABSTRACT
It is crucial to immediately curb the spread of a disease once an outbreak is identified in a pandemic. An agent based simulator will enable the policymakers to evaluate the effectiveness of different hypothetical strategies and policies with a higher level of granularity. This will allow them to identify the vulnerabilities and asses the threat level more effectively, which in turn can be used to build resilience within the community against a pandemic. This study proposes a PanDemic SIMulator (PDSIM ) which is capable of modeling complex environments while simulating realistic human motion patterns. The ability of PDSIM to track the infection propagation patterns, contact paths, places visited, characteristics of people, vaccination, and testing information of the population, allows the user to check the efficacy of different containment strategies and testing protocols. The results obtained based on the case studies of Covid-19 are used to validate the proposed model. However, it is highly extendable to all pandemics in general, enabling robust planning for more sustainable communities.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
Wearable computing is a fast evolving segment of computing that includes smart watches, head mounted wearables such as Magic Leap headsets, Microsoft Hololens, and VR goggles from various vendors. In this report, we present ideas for a smart wearable device that also doubles as a virus protection device. Instead of using the filtering approach that is predominantly used by virus protection equipments such as face masks, we propose to use a computational approach where the device maintains an awareness of the real-time virus spread and use that information to steer the wearer away from the virus. As the wearable has a head enclosing design, viral infection can only happen through the air that is inhaled by the wearer. The objective of the smart wearable is to maintain a repository for clean air and switch the operating modes between stored and fresh air modes depending on the environmental conditions. It can augment this basic operating procedure by recycling the exhaled air to maximize it operating capacity (i.e., time duration for which it could supply the wearer with safe air) and by cleaning the stored air using UVC to further reduces the chance of infection. To maintain an awareness of the virus spread in the environment, the smart wearable will rely on an edge computing framework that will be distributed to cover areas frequented by people. The smart wearable will have modular design so that it can be reconfigured to add or subtract functionality that the wearer wants for a particular situation so that the design remains relevant even after the virus threat recedes.