ABSTRACT
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the health-management experiences of older women living alone during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic through the photovoice method. The research question was as follows: "What were the physical, psychological, and social health management experiences of older women living alone during COVID-19?” Methods: Data collection was conducted by a photovoice method. We visited the homes of 8 participants aged from 80 to 89 years old in the city of Daejeon between June 23 and July 14, 2022 using purposive sampling. Results: As a result of the photovoice study, 125 photos, 15 sub-themes, and four themes were derived. The first theme was "loneliness deepened by COVID-19”, which consisted of the following sub-themes: "lack of communication due to COVID-19”, "staying in nature”, and "aggravated loneliness during COVID-19”. The second theme was "difficulty getting out of the residence”, which included the following sub-themes: "relief stress from COVID-19”, frustrated by the difficulty of going out”, "decreased orientation and going out less frequently”, and "avoiding going out for fear of falling”. The third theme was "health-care lost”, which involved the following sub-themes: "silence as giving up on life”, "asthenia due to lack of appetite”, "painful body”, "many medications and poor health”, and "treatment that doesn't help”. The last theme was "something to depend on during COVID-19”, which consisted of the following sub-themes: "gratitude to care givers”, "longing for a bereaved family”, and "precarious place of residence”. Conclusion: Older women living alone experienced aggravated vulnerability and difficulty with health management due to a lack of social support during the COVID-19 period. This study suggests the need for a social safety network and vividly reveals the necessity of caregivers' support and policy assistance for socially vulnerable populations. © 2023 Korean Gerontological Nursing Society.
ABSTRACT
Background: COVID-19 has contributed to healthcare inequity amongst minorities and lower socioeconomic populations, while complicating present anti-cancer treatment regimens. Due to their immunocompromised status, cancer patients are at an increased risk of severe SARS-CoV-2 infection. While sentiment analysis via SM has seen vast growth among healthcare professional, deeper connection and management has been lacking. Given the higher usage of SM impressions and the increase in healthcare disparities especially at the intersection of oncology and COVID-19, the aim of this study was to develop a platform that can: (1) show that the relationships highlighted within these tweets can be realized in biomolecular interactions-specifically within the interaction between solid tumors and COVID-19;(2) use SM data to connect patients with clinical trials. Methods: To determine this relationship, ontologies, which are groupings of terms and related identifiers, such as genes, were created for general search terms, utilizing the Human Phenotype Ontology. They were then combined with “COVID-19” and used as search terms in Twitter's Standard Search tool. The keywords with the most matches were then queried through clinicaltrials.gov and European Bioinformatics Institute's (EBI) Protein Search Tool to find relevant clinical trials and proteins. Finally, the proteins found by the EBI protein search were run through the SwissModel Tool to find relevant protein structures before being used in binding using Polar+'s Binding Platform from Iff Technologies, which provides K values related to 50% inhibition for each medication or immunotherapy. This produced a set of disease-specific keywords that are related to top tweets, clinical trials, protein structures, and binding concentration values in relevant biomolecular pathways for the keyword set “Tumor COVID-19”. Results: The example shown in Table is produced via our platform, with keywords with tweet numbers greater than 95% of all tweets with connected keywords used. Conclusions: By utilizing SM with highly relevant keywords, this platform can combat healthcare inequity by connecting patients and their tweets to clinical trials and enhance literacy about their medical conditions, while providing a greater understanding of the biomolecular pathways involved.
ABSTRACT
Despite all scientific advancements, the spread of infectious diseases continue to pose a significant challenge to the health and prosperity of our society. Therefore, the prevention and control of infectious diseases that have the potential of becoming global threats is a central priority of public health. However, the silent emergence and uncontrolled global spread of the novel virus called SARS-COV-2 has proven that neither governments nor healthcare systems are prepared to respond to a pandemic. As an example, the coming of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has not only disrupted economies and collapsed healthcare systems, but also filled hospitals and separated people from their families and work across the globe. While the outbreak originated in China, the pandemic's epicenter moved to the US, which has more cases than any country in the world (New York accounted for nearly more than one-third of the country's coronavirus infections). As the US continues to adapt its response to the evolving situation of the virus, the nation's coronavirus pandemic has highlighted many practical uses for blockchain-based applications. Motivated by this, we present a solution for fighting the coronavirus outbreak - and future pandemic outbreaks - in the US using IOTA and QR code technology. In this paper, we propose CoviReader: a decentralized healthcare management system that shares user's data anonymously. The system is built on the IOTA tangle platform and provides users detailed, unchangeable, and easy access to their personal information. CoviReader handles authentication, confidentiality, transparency and data sharing (with crucial considerations when revising confidential information). Users interact with IOTA's tangle via a mobile application which holds a FIREBASE database. The purpose of this short paper is to demonstrate a working prototype by which we assess and analyze strategies for mitigating the consequences of the COVID-19 health crisis in the US.