ABSTRACT
Purpose: There is an ongoing technological revolution in the clinical tools used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to care for patients. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of change and the shift to telepractice. Tele-practice will continue to play a large role after the pandemic, but it is unclear what the future may look like. Our goal is to give SLPs an overview of how recent technological innovations may enhance synchronous treatment, enable asynchronous treatment, and broadly modify traditional clinical practice patterns while the patient spends less time in the clinic. Conclusions: Newer telepractice tools such as remote patient monitoring, digital phenotyping, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence may improve the therapeutic process by addressing the shortage of SLPs and the transition of therapy practices to the real world. We also highlight key barriers to this future, including lack of rigorous trials of advanced technologies and state licensure regulations.
ABSTRACT
CONTEXT: The number of pediatric anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions (ACLRs) occurring yearly increased almost 6-fold from 2004 to 2014. Interestingly, there are limited recent data on rates of ACL injury and reconstruction in children and adolescents, especially in the context of COVID-19. OBJECTIVE: Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth sports seasons and the postponement of many elective surgeries, we sought to examine the changes in rates of ACLR during this period. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: This study used the Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) database to identify eligible patients at PHIS-participating hospitals nationwide from January 2016 to June 2021, with March 1, 2020 considered the "start" of the COVID-19 pandemic. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS: Using CPT codes, patients 18 years old and younger who underwent ACLR surgery were identified. INTERVENTIONS: None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Patient demographics and overall rates of surgery pre- and intra-pandemic were compared. Data were analyzed using bivariate, mixed model, and time series analyses. RESULTS: A total of 24,843 ACLRs were identified during this time period. In total, 1,853 fewer surgeries were performed after March 2020 than expected given pre-pandemic trends. Examining demographics, intra-pandemic, there was an increase in the proportion of patients who identified as White and with private insurance and a decrease in the proportion who identified as Black and with public insurance. There was also a significant shift in the proportion of ACLRs by region, with increased surgeries performed in the Midwest and decreased in the Northeast. In the model adjusted for hospital-level variability, only race and insurance status remained significant. CONCLUSIONS: Based on pre-pandemic trends, there were fewer patients than projected who underwent ACLR once the pandemic began, likely due to a combination of decreased rates of injury and delayed surgery.
ABSTRACT
Covid 19 pandemic has severely affected daily lives. It spreads exponentially, taking many lives and shutting down essentially all outside activities. Since no completely effective vaccines are found yet so far until late December 2020, the only effective way to prevent infection from spreading is to maintain social distancing and precautionary methods. The government banned the gatherings to break down the exponential growth chain. To implement this, a lockdown was imposed. This decision had impacted almost every sector, be it industrial, agricultural, tourism or educational. However, as the condition is getting better, life is becoming as it was earlier before the pandemic, slowly resuming all activities. Since the educational institutions are also about to be opened after being closed for nearly 8 months, since march 2020, it is a very challenging task to ensure safety in the college premises without compromising with the health of the faculties, staff and the stakeholders. In this paper, there are various suggestions discussed using which, safety and proper arrangements can be implemented and optimized in the best case wherein the institutions can run uninterruptedly in the case of any pandemic. This paper also discusses the precautions which can be taken if there is a similar situation nearby future
ABSTRACT
Tracking the type and frequency of cough events is critical for monitoring respiratory diseases. Coughs are one of the most common symptoms of respiratory and infectious diseases like COVID-19, and a cough monitoring system could have been vital in remote monitoring during a pandemic like COVID-19. While the existing solutions for cough monitoring use unimodal (e.g., audio) approaches for detecting coughs, a fusion of multimodal sensors (e.g., audio and accelerometer) from multiple devices (e.g., phone and watch) are likely to discover additional insights and can help to track the exacerbation of the respiratory conditions. However, such multimodal and multidevice fusion requires accurate time synchronization, which could be challenging for coughs as coughs are usually concise events (0.3-0.7 seconds). In this paper, we first demonstrate the time synchronization challenges of cough synchronization based on the cough data collected from two studies. Then we highlight the performance of a cross-correlation based time synchronization algorithm on the alignment of cough events. Our algorithm can synchronize 98.9% of cough events with an average synchronization error of 0.046s from two devices. © 2020 ACM.