ABSTRACT
The dreaded coronavirus (COVID-19) disease traceable to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) has killed thousands of people worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has proclaimed the viral respiratory disease a human pandemic. The adverse flare of COVID-19 and its variants has triggered collaborative research interests across all disciplines, especially in medicine and healthcare delivery. Complex healthcare data collected from patients via sensors and devices are transmitted to the cloud for analysis and sharing. However, it is pretty difficult to achieve rapid and intelligent decisions on the processed information due to the heterogeneity and complexity of the data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently appeared as a promising paradigm to address this issue. The introduction of AI to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) births the era of AI of Medical Things (AIoMT). The AIoMT enables the autonomous operation of sensors and devices to provide a favourable and secure environmental landscape to healthcare personnel and patients. AIoMT finds successful applications in natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and computer vision. In the current emergency, medical-related records comprising blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen level, temperature, and more are collected to examine the medical conditions of patients. However, the power usage of the low-power sensor nodes employed for data transmission to the remote data centres poses significant limitations. Currently, sensitive medical information is transmitted over open wireless channels, which are highly susceptible to malicious attacks, posing a significant security risk. An insightful privacy-aware energy-efficient architecture using AIoMT for COVID-19 pandemic data handling is presented in this chapter. The goal is to secure sensitive medical records of patients and other stakeholders in the healthcare domain. Additionally, this chapter presents an elaborate discussion on improving energy efficiency and minimizing the communication cost to improve healthcare information security. Finally, the chapter highlights the open research issues and possible lines of future research in AIoMT.
ABSTRACT
The economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has effected the global economy, with the main changes expected to affect human life in the future, including food consumption. However, could this pandemic be assumed as a threshold for the suspension of the usual rules behind food choices? This review highlights the changes in food choice motivations before, during, and after the pandemic that have been reported in the literature to date to answer the research question on the changes in food choice motives caused by the pandemic to consumers worldwide. The review comes up with ten key food motives important for consumers, namely health, convenience, sensory appeal, nutritional quality, moral concerns, weight control, mood and anxiety, familiarity, price, and shopping frequency behavior;these motives continue to be significant in the post-pandemic era. Our findings indicate that it is too premature to give definite answers as to what food choice motives in the post-COVID-19 era will be like. Consumers' perceptions and attitudes toward food in the new era are contradictory, depending on the country of the study, the average age, and the sex of the study group. These controversial results illustrate that, for food consumption, motives depend on the population being searched, with changes identified occurring in two directions. The definite answers will be given in three to five years when the new conditions will be clear and a number of studies will have been published. Even though it is too early to fully understand the definite food choice motive changes, defining a "new" index of consumer satisfaction is necessary since it can alter the food sale strategies of retail managers, food companies, and the other parties involved in the agri-food chain.
ABSTRACT
Background: Over the last decade, social media analysis tools have been used to monitor public sentiment and communication methods for public health emergencies such as the Ebola and Zika epidemics. Research articles have indicated that many outbreaks and pandemics could have been promptly controlled if experts considered social media data. With the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic statement and various governments government action on the disease, various sentiments regarding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have spread across the world. Therefore, sentiment analyses in studying pandemics, such as COVID-19, are important based on recent events. Methods: The Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method was used to extract keywords from the 850,083 content of Weibo from January 24, 2020, to March 31, 2020. Then the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to perform topic analysis on the keywords. Finally, the fuzzy-c-means method was used to divide the content of Weibo into seven categories of emotions: fear, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, and good. And the changes in emotion were tracked over time. Results: The results indicated that people showed “surprise” overall (55.89%);however, with time, the “surprise” decreased. As the knowledge regarding the COVID-19 increased, the “surprise” of the citizens decreased (from 59.95% to 46.58%). Citizens’ feelings of “fear” and “good” increased as the number of deaths associated with COVID-19 increased (“fear”: from 15.42% to 20.95% “good”: 10.31% to 18.89%). As the number of infections was suppressed, the feelings of “fear” and “good” diminished (“fear”: from 20.95% to 15.79% “good”: from 18.89% to 8.46%). Conclusions: The findings of this study indicate that people’s feelings were analyzed regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in three stages over time. In the beginning, people’s emotions were primarily “surprised”;however after the outbreak, people’s “surprise” decreased with increasing knowledge. At the end of the phase, I of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s “fear” and “good” feelings were diminished as the epidemic was suppressed. People’s interest shifted from China to other countries and their concern about the situation in other countries. © Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: This study aims to identify the characteristics of the maritime shipping network in Northeast Asia as well as compare the level of port connectivity among these container ports in the region. In addition, this study analyses the change in role and position of 20 ports in the region by clustering these ports based on connectivity index and container throughput and route index. Design/methodology/approach: This study employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) to delineate the international connectivity of major container ports in Northeast Asia. Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to identify each port's connectivity index and container throughput index, and the resulting indexes are employed as the basis to cluster 20 major ports by fuzzy C-mean (FCM). Findings: The results revealed that Northeast Asia is a highly connected maritime shipping network with the domination of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Busan. Furthermore, both container throughput and connectivity in almost all container ports in the region have decreased significantly due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The rapid growth of Shenzhen and Ningbo has allowed them to join Cluster 1 with Shanghai while maintaining high connectivity, yet decreasing container throughput has pushed Busan down to Cluster 2. Originality/value: The originality of this study is to combine indexes of SNA into connectivity index reflecting characteristics of the maritime shipping network in Northeast Asia and categorize 20 major ports by FCM. © 2022, Pacific Star Group Education Foundation.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has revealed global supply chains' vulnerability and sparked debate about increasing supply chain resilience (SCRES). Previous SCRES research has primarily focused on near-term responses to large-scale disruptions, neglecting long-term resilience approaches. We address this research gap by presenting empirical evidence from a Delphi study. Based on the resource dependence theory, we developed 10 projections for 2025 on promising supply chain adaptations, which were assessed by 94 international supply chain experts from academia and industry. The results reveal that companies prioritize bridging over buffering approaches as long-term responses for increasing SCRES. Promising measures include increasing risk criteria importance in supplier selection, supply chain collaboration, and supply chain mapping. In contrast, experts ascribe less priority to safety stocks and coopetition. Moreover, we present a stakeholder analysis confirming one of the resource dependence theory's central propositions for the future of global supply chains: companies differently affected by externalities will choose different countermeasures.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a fundamental shift in the Chinese education system, which has compelled teachers and students to accommodate the process of online learning in a short period of time. Accompanied by the advancement of information technology and the emergence of small private online courses (SPOCs), a variety of online programs containing a wealth of new materials and novel pedagogical approaches have emerged. However, there is a lack of awareness among researchers about the efficacy of utilizing shared SPOCs in teaching at conventional universities. Flipped classroom model (FCM) can make up for this defect. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of flipped learning on the basis of SPOC and to suggest explicit criteria for its reuse in conventional college education. We carried out a quasi-experiment in a course on inorganic chemistry and examined findings with regard to the engagement and performance of the learners. We also conducted a post-task questionnaire and interviews to examine the experiences of the students so that those experiences could be incorporated into the design and study plan for flipped learning based on SPOCs. It was shown that the average performance of students in the flipped SPOC-based classroom was superior to that of students in the traditional classroom. Furthermore, the combination of quantitative and qualitative data showed that the majority of students experienced the flipped classroom favorably regarding student interaction, accessible learning resources, and proactive academic outcomes.
ABSTRACT
Multi-center location of pharmaceutical logistics is the focus of pharmaceutical logistics research, and the dynamic uncertainty of pharmaceutical logistics multi-center location is a difficult point of research. In order to reduce the risk and cost of multi-enterprise, multi-category, large-volume, high-efficiency, and nationwide centralized medicine distribution, this study explores the best solution for planning medicine delivery for the medicine logistics. In this paper, based on the idea of big data, comprehensive consideration is given to uncertainties in center location, medicine type, medicine chemical characteristics, cost of medicine quality control (refrigeration and monitoring costs), delivery timeliness, and other factors. On this basis, a multi-center location- and route-optimization model for a medicine logistics company under dynamic uncertainty is constructed. The accuracy of the algorithm is improved by hybridizing the fuzzy C-means algorithm, sequential quadratic programming algorithm, and variable neighborhood search algorithm to combine the advantages of each. Finally, the model and the algorithm are verified through multi-enterprise, multi-category, high-volume, high-efficiency, and nationwide centralized medicine distribution cases, and various combinations of the three algorithms and several rival algorithms are compared and analyzed. Compared with rival algorithms, this hybrid algorithm has higher accuracy in solving multi-center location path optimization problem under the dynamic uncertainty in pharmaceutical logistics.
ABSTRACT
Hospitals as healthcare centers have faced many challenges with the Covid-19 spread, which results in a decline in the quality of health care. Because the number of patients referred to hospitals increases dramatically during the pandemic, providing high-quality services and satisfying them is more important than ever to maintain community health and create loyal customers in the future. However, health care quality standards are generally designed for normal circumstances. The SERVPERF standard, which measures customer perceptions of service quality, has also been adjusted for hospital service quality measurement. In this study, the SERVPERF standard criteria for health services are evaluated in the Covid-19 pandemic. For this purpose, by considering the causal relationships between the criteria and using Z-Number theory and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs), the importance of these criteria in the prevalence of infectious diseases was analyzed. According to the results, hospital reliability, hospital hygiene, and completeness of the hospital with ratios 0.9559, 0.9305, and 0.9268 are respectively the most influential criteria in improving the quality of health services in the spread of infectious diseases circumstances such as the Covid-19 pandemic. A review of the literature shows that in previous studies, comprehensive research has not been done on prioritizing the criteria for measuring the quality of health services in the context of the spread of infectious diseases.
ABSTRACT
Repurposed drugs that block the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its receptor ACE2 could offer a rapid route to novel COVID-19 treatments or prophylactics. Here, we screened 2,701 compounds from a commercial library of drugs approved by international regulatory agencies for their ability to inhibit the binding of recombinant, trimeric SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to recombinant human ACE2. We identified 56 compounds that inhibited binding in a concentration-dependent manner, measured the IC50 of binding inhibition, and computationally modeled the docking of the best inhibitors to the Spike-ACE2 binding interface. The best candidates were Thiostrepton, Oxytocin, Nilotinib, and Hydroxycamptothecin with IC50's in the 4-9 µM range. These results highlight an effective screening approach to identify compounds capable of disrupting the Spike-ACE2 interaction, as well as identify several potential inhibitors of the Spike-ACE2 interaction.