ABSTRACT
Introduction. The rapid shift to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges for physical therapy (PT) education worldwide. This article aims to explore the factors influencing the well-being of the PT faculty and department chairs involved in delivering PT programs during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Review of Literature. The literature has focused on the pedagogical impacts of the rapid shift to online learning. Little is known about the social and psychological impacts of this rapid transition on the well-being of the faculty involved in implementing PT programs. Subjects. Physical therapy faculty and department chairs at 3 universities in metropolitan Sydney, Australia who taught into or led PT programs in 2020. Methods. Focus group methodology was used to explore the experiences of PT faculty and department chairs during the initial stages of the COVID pandemic. The focus groups were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim and the transcripts analyzed thematically. Results: The main finding of this study was the extent of stress experienced by PT program faculty and chairs during this period. Both work-related institutional and faculty factors and non-work-related personal factors contributed to perceived high levels of stress. Overall, there was a feeling that the stressors had not improved over the duration of the pandemic and that this had left the faculty and chairs feeling more fatigued, less collegiate, and may have ongoing impacts on their mental health. Discussion: The pandemic created stresses for faculty and program chairs over and above the usual stress of faculty and college work. The reality of taking steps to reduce the stressors in the current climate is very difficult. Conclusion. Moving forward, it is vital to secure increased institutional support, including the support for creating realistic boundaries without the risk of penalty, to address the psychological health and well-being of PT faculty and chairs to enable high-quality education in the future. Copyright © 2023 Academy of Physical Therapy Education, APTA.
ABSTRACT
Biometrics are the among most popular authentication methods due to their advantages over traditional methods, such as higher security, better accuracy and more convenience. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to the wide use of face masks, which greatly affects the traditional face recognition technology. The pandemic has also increased the focus on hygienic and contactless identity verification methods. The forearm is a new biometric that contains discriminative information. In this paper, we proposed a multimodal recognition method that combines the veins and geometry of a forearm. Five features are extracted from a forearm Near-Infrared (Near-Infrared) image: SURF, local line structures, global graph representations, forearm width feature and forearm boundary feature. These features are matched individually and then fused at the score level based on the Improved Analytic Hierarchy Process-entropy weight combination. Comprehensive experiments were carried out to evaluate the proposed recognition method and the fusion rule. The matching results showed that the proposed method can achieve a satisfactory performance.