ABSTRACT
The climate in urban centers can differ significantly from the immediate surrounding areas;this can pose health risks to the elderly who have spent much of their lives in urban centers and then move to more rural areas for retirement. Therefore, there is a need to develop educational software applications for the elderly that needs to account for their life experiences aside from physiological restrictions. This research created a connected wireframe for an educational assistant to make the elderly aware of the climate differences between their urban and rural residences. To address the difficulty of recruiting vulnerable subjects, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we evaluated our wireframe using a combination of heuristic evaluation and a variation of the Delphi process, an expert consensus-building tool typically used for market forecasting. © ICCE 2022.All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
There is always a need of 24 hours monitoring system for the growing number of patients being in home cared due to reasons like aging, diabetes, covid-19, disabilities. The personal vital monitoring of an individual can be considered as a valuable resource for assisting them. The increase in the number of patients has also led to a decrease in the relative number of health workers per patient, which results in ignored or delay in diagnostics. This paper tries to focus on bringing a good patient monitoring system for assisting patients according to their vitals and their regular activities. This monitoring system uses IoT which is connected to a raspberry pi 4 for processing. In this monitoring system data is being collected from various sensors to analyze the heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. To monitor patients activities - video input through the camera is used and processing the input is done by using raspberry pi 4. This process helps to analysis the patient health based on both the vitals and the activities, also provides feedback according to the collected data. The system also helps to reduce the ratio of the number of patients to the number of doctors which is reducing unnecessary visit, readmission, cost as well giving signaling live alerts. So the project is to develop a device that monitors a patient's regular activity and vitals and assists the patient without any supervision and to assist them according to their vitals. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
People with care and support needs were often badly affected by Covid-19, although the impact on people employing Personal Assistants (PAs) has not been addressed. We aimed to explore the experiences of people employing PAs during the pandemic to inform care systems and social work practice. Remote qualitative interviews were conducted with seventy PA employers across England in 2021-2022. Data were analysed thematically to explore salient themes. The Covid-19 pandemic elucidated role tensions of PA employers: Navigating care arrangements during a time of unprecedented uncertainty reinforced participants' role as an employer, but exposed some aspects of employment responsibilities and legal obligations that participants felt ill-equipped to manage. Reports of contact with or by social workers were few and not perceived as helpful. The often-informal nature of PA arrangements and its blurred relational boundaries affected participants' expectations of their PAs. PA employers would welcome support from social workers in their employment role and flexibility with care plans, albeit with greater autonomy over their Direct Payment (DP) budget to enhance the potential of this arrangement. In the context of declining DP uptake in England, our study offers some potential explanations for this, with suggestions for systemic change and social work practice. How were people with care and support needs who employ social care Personal Assistants (PAs) affected by the Covid-19 pandemic? We interviewed seventy PA employers in England in 2021-2022 to ask them what happened to their care and support, and about their contacts with social workers from their local authority (LA). We found that employing a PA during the pandemic heightened many people's awareness of their employment responsibilities, particularly around trying to keep their PAs safe from the risk of the Covid-19 virus infection, and from the hardship of lost income during times when PAs were not working (e.g. during periods of national lockdown where 'social distancing' rules were in place). Several participants reported no or little contact with a social worker since the pandemic started which may have been the result of LAs postponing reviews. Some participants had wanted to use their Direct Payments differently and in a way that they thought would enable them to better meet their needs than previously agreed. When this was a problem or seemed to be so, LA staff were thought to lack understanding of the needs of people employing PAs during the Covid-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Social care Personal Assistants (PAs) are directly employed by individuals to assist with activities of daily living such as help or support with personal care, shopping, household tasks and community participation. This option is encouraged by UK public funding. In England, disabled people's support organisations initially offered assistance with such arrangements, although numbers doing this have declined. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to ask those remaining organisations providing support for PA employers about their activities during this time and the questions being posed to them by PA employers. This paper reports data from 15 interviews undertaken March-July 2021 with disability support organisation representatives. We identified one overarching theme 'Working to prevent and challenge marginalisation of PA employers', with three related subthemes: (1) Advocating for the voice of a forgotten group; (2) Needing to be proactive and (3) Adapting to new tasks and ways of working. Participant accounts focused on representing the needs of disabled people to the authorities and providing concise, timely and accurate information to PA employers, particularly around the use of public funds during Covid-19. Remote working amplified the digital-divide, resulting in these organisations working hard to ensure PA employers received important information about their support options. Befriending services and Covid-hubs were established by some organisations to reduce isolation and risks of poor mental health amongst PA employers. Many of the challenges facing PA employers existed pre-pandemic but were perceived to have been heightened during it, reflecting the value of and need for the work of these local support organisations. Our findings suggest areas where effective contingency planning drawn from closer collaboration between disability support organisations and central and local government might usefully be focussed. The potential for specific services or organisations to be commissioned to provide such support is discussed.
ABSTRACT
Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), such as Amazon's Alexa, are now widely used for an ample variety of tasks, ranging from personal management to education. These tools have shown considerable promise for student-educator interactions, especially at a distance, a potential that has come to the forefront during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, this potential is still underexploited, even in the current scenario. Alexa's apps are known as skills, which include all the different commands that Alexa is capable of executing. It is important to note, however, that the use of such technology is work-intensive and can be relatively complex. Given this, to facilitate the development of new skills in Alexa, we have developed an online tool that permits the creation of questions and answers, as well as honing the interaction between Alexa and the user. We have named this tool ForAlexa, which has two types of forms, Question-And-Answer (Q&A) and Random-Quote. Both these forms allow the user to build intents (an activity that is invoked by a spoken request from the user), but with slightly different functions. The Q&A form is used to compile answers that Alexa will offer in response to an utterance (question), while the Random-Quote extends the interaction between Alexa and the user, based on the questions asked in the first form. ForAlexa also has a help assistant, as well as a manual, which explains all the steps necessary for the design of an intent. This tool allows educators to develop apps quickly and easily for their classes and this type of app could be an alternative to be used for students with special needs, such as the visually-impaired. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12052-022-00169-z.
ABSTRACT
Humans start their day by looking in the mirror at least once before leaving their homes every morning. In addition, they waste some considerable time of their busy workload in front of the mirror. To make this time more productive and useful, there ought to be a system that can be readily conducted, user-friendly, and smart according to the constant progress on the Internet of Things. The intelligent mirror is a new addition to the smart device family, which is a straightforward concept. There will be a screen placed behind a two-way mirror, and this Intelligent Mirror turns our room or bathroom mirror into a personal assistant with artificial intelligence. The purpose is to develop a smart mirror that can automate working humans' busy daily routines and manage their tasks when they spend their time in front of a mirror. To make the most of this moment, users can securely access all the relevant details of the day by looking in the mirror simultaneously. The intelligent mirror, which a single voice command can activate, will significantly help disabled persons and the general. Raspberry Pi has been used to build the proposed intelligent mirror, linked to the digital world via the Internet. The mirror can communicate with the user through voice commands and reply appropriately. The monitoring of emotions and health measuring function will provide a distinctive experience to the users. The mirror will reflect important elements such as weather, date & time, covid-19 situation reports, local news, To-do list, water reminder, home workouts, and meal plans. The mirror can also handle specialized functions such as automating and controlling home IoT devices. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus cases were first reported on 2019 in Wuhan, following the outbreak of the same worldwide. India is the country with second largest population more than 1.34 billion and for such a country to manage this exponentially increasing deadly virus is a major challenge. In the initial period of this outbreak, we had no medicine/vaccine to put a full stop to this highly contagious and destructing virus. Rather the only armour that protects us is to wash our hands regularly, wear mask whenever we move out of our shelters and maintain social distance. At present though we have various vaccines introduced, it's our duty to follow the preventive measures. This paper aims to streamline the previous issues discussed by introducing a personal assistant that reminds the person on wearing mask while peeking out of shelters, to have sanitizer with them remotely, to restrict the amount of time they spend out and generate a final report with all the information about the places they visited and time spent out will be sent to the user on a monthly basis. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Writing software (programs) is an obstruction, we do not have so many good developers who can develop much more enhanced models and so, for this purpose today many use the data instead of people to perform the same task. According to the generations’ needs, the programmers developed the machine learning approach to make the programming much more scalable and expandable in this domain. Before, machine learning traditional programming is a much more famous approach where programmers used to code each and every single line with their own and its main drawback is that it is not so much scalable. Here, in this chapter we are going to discuss various applications of machine learning and the algorithms they are using along with their advantage, disadvantage, and its working model of how much the particular application is scalable. Like we are going to discuss virtual personal assistants, email spam, online fraud detection, traffic predictions, social media personalization, and many more. In coming to algorithms, we will get to know about Naive Bayes algorithms, neural networks, KNN algorithms, linear regression model, logistic regression model, etc. On coming to today’s need we are also going to discuss its applications in detection of COVID-19 defaulters by the use of semantic segmentation algorithms. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Personal Assistants (PA) or client-hired workers are directly employed by people needing care and support, often making use of government funding. In the context of Covid-19, questions emerged about how this workforce is supported to practice safely. This paper reports PAs' understanding and views of infection control during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in England. Telephone interviews were undertaken with 41 PAs between 16th April and 21st May 2020. PAs were recruited from a sample that had participated in a previous study in 2014-16. Interview questions focused on changes arising from the pandemic. Data were transcribed and analysed using Framework analysis. This paper focuses on PAs' perceptions of their role and responsibilities in preventing and managing infection. Arising themes were identified about barriers and facilitators affecting infection control in five areas: accessing information, social isolation, handwashing, hygiene, personal protective equipment and potential attitude to vaccines. Infection prevention and control are under-researched in the home care sector generally and efforts are needed to develop knowledge of how to manage infection risks in home settings by non-clinically trained staff such as PAs and how to engage home care users with these efforts, especially when they are the direct employers.