Distributed mixed reality learning environments for interactive public health education

Understanding a concept that people cannot observe directly in real life is always challenging in education. It could be even more difficult for public health education topics such as viruses or bacteria. However, public health education is critical for understanding the knowledge of the virus in the age of COVID-19. Thus, this paper proposes a distributed mixed reality environment to enhance public health education in the internet of things (IoT) context. We introduce the design methodology based on the mixed reality interaction characteristics, the implementation, and the initial evaluation. © 2023 Author(s).

A class of anomalous diffusion epidemic models based on CTRW and distributed delay

In recent years, the epidemic model with anomalous diffusion has gained popularity in the literature. However, when introducing anomalous diffusion into epidemic models, they frequently lack physical explanation, in contrast to the traditional reaction-diffusion epidemic models. The point of this paper is to guarantee that anomalous diffusion systems on infectious disease spreading remain physically reasonable. Specifically, based on the continuous-time random walk (CTRW), starting from two stochastic processes of the waiting time and the step length, time-fractional space-fractional diffusion, time-fractional reaction-diffusion and fractional-order diffusion can all be naturally introduced into the SIR (S: susceptible, I: infectious and R: recovered) epidemic models, respectively. The three models mentioned above can also be applied to create SIR epidemic models with generalized distributed time delays. Distributed time delay systems can also be reduced to existing models, such as the standard SIR model, the fractional infectivity model and others, within the proper bounds. Meanwhile, as an application of the above stochastic modeling method, the physical meaning of anomalous diffusion is also considered by taking the SEIR (E: exposed) epidemic model as an example. Similar methods can be used to build other types of epidemic models, including SIVRS (V: vaccine), SIQRS (Q: quarantined) and others. Finally, this paper describes the transmission of infectious disease in space using the real data of COVID-19. © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Detecting Fake News about COVID-19 Infodemic Using Deep Learning and Content Analysis

With the widespread use of social media, online social platforms like Twitter have become a place of rapid dissemination of information―both accurate and inaccurate. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the overabundance of fake information and rumours on online social platforms about the COVID-19 pandemic has spread over society as quickly as the virus itself. As a result, fake news poses a significant threat to effective virus response by negatively affecting people's willingness to follow the proper public health guidelines and protocols, which makes it important to identify fake information from online platforms for the public interest. In this research, we introduce an approach to detect fake news using deep learning techniques, which outperform traditional machine learning techniques with a 93.1% accuracy. We then investigate the content differences between real and fake news by applying topic modeling and linguistic analysis. Our results show that topics on Politics and Government services are most common in fake news. In addition, we found that fake news has lower analytic and authenticity scores than real news. With the findings, we discuss important academic and practical implications of the study. © 2022,Asia Pacific Journal of Information Systems.All Rights Reserved.

A class of anomalous diffusion epidemic models based on CTRW and distributed delay

In recent years, the epidemic model with anomalous diffusion has gained popularity in the literature. However, when introducing anomalous diffusion into epidemic models, they frequently lack physical explanation, in contrast to the traditional reaction-diffusion epidemic models. The point of this paper is to guarantee that anomalous diffusion systems on infectious disease spreading remain physically reasonable. Specifically, based on the continuous-time random walk (CTRW), starting from two stochastic processes of the waiting time and the step length, time-fractional space-fractional diffusion, time-fractional reaction-diffusion and fractional-order diffusion can all be naturally introduced into the SIR (S: susceptible, I: infectious and R: recovered) epidemic models, respectively. The three models mentioned above can also be applied to create SIR epidemic models with generalized distributed time delays. Distributed time delay systems can also be reduced to existing models, such as the standard SIR model, the fractional infectivity model and others, within the proper bounds. Meanwhile, as an application of the above stochastic modeling method, the physical meaning of anomalous diffusion is also considered by taking the SEIR (E: exposed) epidemic model as an example. Similar methods can be used to build other types of epidemic models, including SIVRS (V: vaccine), SIQRS (Q: quarantined) and others. Finally, this paper describes the transmission of infectious disease in space using the real data of COVID-19.

Assessment of Infection Risk Based on Travel Behavior Analysis -Example of Jiangsu Province Travel during COVID-19

In order to correctly evaluate the travel infection risks during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study proposed an infection risk assessment model based on the travel behavior analysis. Using the epidemiological survey data and online questionnaire data in Jiangsu, China this study developed and calibrated the travel behavior models for virus carriers and ordinary individuals. The travel behaviors of virus carriers and ordinary individuals were also compared. The infection risks were evaluated for different travel modes and travel activities. The results indicate that: (1) implementing strict traffic control measures significantly reduces the infection risk;(2) the infection risk of medical treatment travel activities is significantly higher than other travel activities;(3) business or leisure travel activities expose to a higher infection risk in the early stages of the pandemic;(4) the risk of non-motor vehicle travel is relatively low. Copyright © 2020 by Science Press.