ABSTRACT
In 2020 where the Covid-19 virus starts spreading around the world, many countries suffered and are forced to go through lockdowns. This creates a new norm where people are encouraged to stay at home and only go out for the purpose of getting necessities. However, in this condition, people are still urged to keep an active lifestyle by doing exercises indoors. This results in the increase of people working out at home with reference to trainer videos found online. Having said so, these trainers cannot advice or look after the people ‘mimicking' them through their screens. Therefore, an idea was sparked to create an exercise assistant program to compare the posture of the user against the video referenced. With this program, it can evaluate the performance and accuracy of exercise done by the user and provide feedback to the user to improve in their future attempt on the same exercise. With the help of the MediaPipe pose estimation model, the Joint Coordinates of the users can be obtained. These data will then be converted into 12 of the main human body Joint Angles before going through a dynamic comparison method called the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping). Thus, the similarity of each joint of the user and the referenced video can be successfully acquired. Other than that, both user's and trainer's Joint Angles are also plotted in graphs at the same time to provide a visual representation of the differences found. This system is believed to have the potential to be integrated into the educational and healthcare world in the future as a method to constantly monitor and notice what is necessary to improve. © School of Engineering, Taylor's University.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 outbreak brought challenges to the education sector in Malaysia as schools were shut down and later on, operate under strict standard operating procedures (SOP) and guidelines. This situation caused inconvenience to school authorities as the education process was significantly affected. Smart building systems that integrate various technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), mechanisms and robotics and building management systems allow school authorities to operate the schools under the new norm. Therefore, this research was conducted to propose a safe operation of the physical teaching and learning process in schools by leveraging smart building systems. A qualitative method was adopted which involved the participation of five schools in Kedah. Findings revealed that smart building systems are suitable to be implemented in schools to create a safe environment and operation for the physical teaching and learning process under the new norm. © 2022 by MIP.
ABSTRACT
Although switching from non-renewable to renewable energy is believed to stimulate low-carbon economic growth, the means to establishing this energy transition have largely remained unexplored in the extant literature. Against this backdrop, this study focuses on evaluating how scaling public investment in renewable energy-related research and development projects impacts the carbon productivity levels in the top-10 renewable energy-investing countries. The estimation strategy comprised econometric methods that can handle cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity related concerns in the data. Regarding the key findings, higher public research and development-related investments in renewable energy are observed to boost carbon productivity levels in the concerned countries, while natural resource consumption and net exports are found to reduce carbon productivity. Besides, the results endorsed that public research and development investment for renewable energy development exhibits a moderating role by jointly boosting carbon productivity with higher natural resource consumption and net exports. Moreover, it is also seen to inflict a mediating effect by jointly boosting carbon productivity with urbanization. In line with these findings, the concerned governments are recommended to scale such investment in order to stimulate technological innovation so that renewable energy transition can take place to establish low carbon economic growth. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of responsive institutions: governments and communities coordinating policy changes;media, social networks, and officials swiftly and accurately conveying information;and an engaged public. This special issue explores social and political factors that both shaped initial response to the pandemic, and were altered by it. Institutional inequalities and variations in government response created significant differences in health outcomes even as the contagious nature of the pandemic linked spaces and people. Thus COVID-19 created new crises, exacerbated inequalities, and led to broad social changes. Social scientists will spend decades unraveling the consequences of COVID-19. This issue challenges scholars to apply existing theories and frameworks, but also to see the pandemic as an event that stimulates us to reevaluate settled paradigms.
ABSTRACT
The advent of the 5G era has promoted the popularization of informatization education, and it has become more convenient for people to use the Internet to obtain knowledge. Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the use of the Internet for online education by educational institutions has become a trend, and the use of the Internet for online teaching has become the most important teaching mode. At the same time, the transformation of teaching methods has also brought huge challenges and opportunities to dance teaching. China Dance Net is an important APP for Chinese dance lovers and professionals to learn dance. At present, there are few relevant studies on the acceptance of dance students’ online use. This research aims to discover outstanding problems in online dance learning, to improve the organizational efficiency of dance online teaching and student learning participation rate, to improve the quality of online teaching operation, and to promote the connotative development of Chinese dance education online classrooms. This research takes the dance teaching sharing platform of China Dance Network as the research object and researches professional students who use China Dance Network. It uses a quantitative research method that combines qualitative research and quantitative research, distributes questionnaires to students, and analyzes the results. The results of the research show that students’ attitudes towards dance are positively correlated with the ease of use, perceived practicality of China Dance Network, students’ attitudes towards China Dance Network, and students’ willingness to use China Dance Network. © 2022, Scibulcom Ltd.. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: Inappropriate attendances (IAs) to emergency departments (ED) create an unnecessary strain on healthcare systems. With decreased ED attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study postulates that there are less IAs compared to before the pandemic and identifies factors associated with IAs. METHODS: We performed a retrospective review of 29,267 patient presentations to a healthcare cluster in Singapore from 7 April 2020 to 1 June 2020, and 36,370 patients within a corresponding period in 2019. This time frame coincided with local COVID-19 lockdown measures. IAs were defined as patient presentations with no investigations required, with patients eventually discharged from the ED. IAs in the 2020 period during the pandemic were compared with 2019. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to identify factors associated with IAs. RESULTS: There was a decrease in daily IAs in 2020 compared to 2019 (9.91+/-3.06 versus 24.96+/-5.92, P<0.001). IAs were more likely with self-referrals (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.58, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.50-1.66) and walk-ins (aOR 4.96, 95% CI 4.59-5.36), and those diagnosed with non-specific headache (aOR 2.08, 95% CI 1.85-2.34), or non-specific low back pain (aOR 1.28, 95% CI 1.15-1.42). IAs were less likely in 2020 compared to 2019 (aOR 0.67, 95% CI 0.65-0.71) and older patients (aOR 0.79 each 10 years, 95% CI 0.78-0.80). CONCLUSION: ED IAs decreased during COVID-19. The pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to examine factors associated with IAs.