Technology-Driven Implementation of Smart Entrances in Public Places during the COVID-19

This research proposes a smart entrance system to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic in public places. The system can help automate standard operating procedures (SOPs) for checking. The paper focuses on exploring the problem context related to the COVID-19 SOPs for public places. The research on technologies involves using thermal cameras, fingerprint recognition, face recognition, iris recognition, object detection and cloud computing. These technologies can be integrated to provide a more versatile and effective solution. The technological solutions proposed by contemporary researchers are also critically analysed by investigating their advantages and disadvantages. © 2023 IEEE.

Designing for the Embedding of Employee Voice

Previous research on employee voice has sought to design technological solutions that address the challenges of speaking up in the workplace. However, effectively embedding employee voice systems in organisations requires designers to engage with the social processes, power relations and contextual factors of individual workplaces. We explore this process within a university workplace through a research project responding to a crisis in educational service delivery arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a successful three-month staff-led engagement, we examined the intricacies of embedding employee voice, exploring how the interactions between existing actors impacted the effectiveness of the process. We sought to identify specific actions to promote employee voice and overcome barriers to its successful establishment in organisational decision-making. We highlight design considerations for an effective employee voice system that facilitates embedding employee voice, including assurance, bounded accountability and bias reflexivity. © 2023 ACM.

Towards Face-to-Face Smart Classroom that Adheres to Covid'19 Restrictions

Smart classrooms have improved dramatically in recent years, especially during the period of the pandemic of Covid-19 when the lockdowns were imposed in reaction to the virus's spread. Governments endeavor to maintain learning stability and seek technological solutions to establish teaching continuity. Therefore, distance learning was a viable interim solution;nevertheless, not all students worldwide have access to digital learning resources, and because of a variety of other issues, online education may be a poor choice. In this paper, we propose a model for an intelligent face-to-face classroom that adheres to Covid-19's constraints. Our proposed system transmits a real-time warning to the classroom supervisor (teacher) if students are not wearing their masks properly or are not respecting the physical distancing during the session. We base our suggested system components on existing research in artificial intelligence and deep learning-based facial recognition systems. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Conceptual Mapping of the Cybersecurity Culture to Human Factor Domain Framework

Human related vulnerability challenges continue to increase as organisations intensify their use of interconnected technologies for operations particularly due to the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the challenge of a human problem on cybersecurity, existing cybersecurity measures predominately focused on technological solutions which on their own have proven to be insufficient. To ensure all-inclusive cybersecurity solution, efforts are shifting to accommodate human angle which complements technological efforts towards eradicating cybersecurity challenges hence the move to cybersecurity culture (CSC). The importance of the human-related factor on the security of information and IT system has been emphasised by various research leading to the development of Human Factor Diamond (HFD) framework. This paper at the conceptual level mapped the articulated list of identified CSC factors to the HFD framework to determine the CSC factors that are associated with the different domains of human factor framework. The mapping depicts that each domain of human factor framework has CSC factors associated to it. Management appeared as the domain with the predominate number of factors, followed by responsibility, environment and preparedness respectively. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Access Control Through Mask Detection and Estimation of People Capacity in Covered Premises

The health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic requires the search for technological and intelligent solutions that facilitate the control of biosecurity measures such as social distancing, to use of a mask, and capacity in covered spaces. This work aims to develop a prototype based on artificial vision algorithms, capable of performing the automatic mask detection and people counting who go to covered premises such as bars, restaurants, gyms, cinemas, and micro-market among others. The prototype implements SSD-MobileNet object detection and SORT tracking algorithms that work on the electronic device NVIDIA Jetson Nano, equipped with two video cameras to perform mask detection and people counting respectively, as well as speakers, for emission of audible alert messages about the use of mask and the capacity estimation within the premise and an external web server too in which people counter information is displayed. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

I miss my Office in my home Office: Challenges with work from home

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent many employees to home offices. Some employees enjoy their home office, while for various reasons others experience challenges working from home. Qualitative investigations show that new employees who have been recruited and hired during the COVID-19 pandemic can find life in the home office quite challenging. Despite adequate technological solutions that make it possible to perform the work tasks from home, these employees want to be able to physically attend at their workplace. Our data indicate that it is important that the company not only sees technology and digitalization as "hard core" skills, but that the digital and technological are woven into other aspects of organizational life, for example, structures, culture and social interaction. New employees need to feel that they are valued, and that the business wants to establish personal and social bonds that support the development of loyalty to the company and quality of the production. These are conditions that are often tied to informal learning in the workplace. Relational development and maintenance are vital for having newcomers to not only function in the digital arena, but also within the physical sphere at the workplace. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.

Towards acceptable emerging technologies for homemonitoring and care: a feasibility study with COVID-19 patients

Healthcare continuity and remote care are among the key components for tackling disease-related effects using technological solutions. People recovering from home need high-quality of care and timely monitoring, resembling hospital care. This study proposes the use of a new device for person - machine interaction for home monitoring. The system takes advantage of automatic interaction initiated by the device on detecting patients' symptoms and providing remote care in order to improve technology engagement features. The feasibility of the proposed system was tested in COVID-19 patients as a definitive case of stay-at-home care where the treatment depends on the current state of health and the severity of the symptoms. The study shows promising results in terms of usability. The vast majority of the answers are perceiving the system as useful (90.9%) and easy to use (95.5%) and the overall System Usability Score (SUS) of the system is 65.25. The system usage adherence was also promising for the quarantine period (on average 7.2 days) but dropped after that. However, the results from the clinical team interviews showed that there is a need for sufficient allocated time for clinicians to get acquainted with the system and for ED staff to explain the device to patients. © 2022 IEEE.

Digital health shopping assistant with React Native: a simple technological solution to a complex health problem

Today, more and more people are reporting allergies, which can range from simple reactions / discomfort to anaphylactic shocks. Other people may not be allergic but avoid certain foods for personal reasons. Daily food shopping of these people is hampered by the fact that unwanted ingredients can be hidden in any food, and it is difficult to find them all. The paper presents a digital health shopping assistant called 'Diet Helper', aimed to make life easier for such people by making it easy to determine whether a product is suitable for consumption, according to the specific dietary requirements of both types - existing diet and self-defined. This is achieved by capturing ingredient label, received by the app as an input, which the app analyses, converting the captured label to text, and filters out unwanted ingredients that according to the user should be avoided as either allergens or products to which the consumer is intolerant, helping the user decide if the product is suitable for consumption. This should make daily grocery shopping easier by providing the user with more accurate and simplified product selection in seconds, reducing the total time spent in the grocery stores, which is especially relevant in light of COVID-19, although it was and will remain out of it due to the busy schedules and active rhythm of life of modern society. The app is developed using the React Native framework and Google Firebase platform, which makes it easy to develop, use and extend such solutions thereby encouraging to start actively developing solutions that could improve wellbeing. © 2022 IEEE.

Commuter Student Integration During COVID-19

This Complete Research paper describes the experiences of commuter students pertaining to integration during COVID-19. Many colleges and universities host a large population of commuter students who often live at home and also work part-time or full-time jobs. Although there are varying definitions of commuter students, typically they are defined as someone who does not reside in University housing and primarily live at home with their families. Commuter student needs differ significantly from residential students. On top of academics and extracurricular activities, commuter students face the daily challenge of commuting to and from campus. However, a recent report found that there were more students that wanted to and or chose to live at home even with the extra demands on being a commuter student. The COVID-19 pandemic has added another challenge to commuter students as well. The incorporation of online classes and having almost no opportunity to be in on campus in person has left many students, especially commuter students, feeling isolated and disconnected from university life. The pandemic allowed for many technological solutions to attending classes but the challenge to stay connected and involved was often overlooked and left some commuter students disheartened. The ability to integrate or involve those commuter students fully into the university environment is important to the success and graduation of those students. Commuter students face many challenges that students who live on campus do not. Socialization for college students and peer group interaction positively affects critical thinking skills as well as academic development, thus having this key element to university life is critical to the success of students. However, commuter students often miss out on those opportunities because of their living situation and were directly impacted by having no on-campus interaction because of the online nature of classes caused by the pandemic. Another hurdle faced by commuter students is a lack of face-to-face contact with their instructors. It is also important to understand the connection between student's involvement on campus and the benefits of a high-level involvement, especially in terms of graduation. Those students who integrate more successfully are at less of a risk of dropping out. Students that have higher interaction with university academic and social systems tend to persist at higher rates. In order to ensure the success of commuter students we need to find ways in which to integrate them fully into the campus and create new programs and outreach to ensure future success. Thus, we frame this study in the Model of Co-Curricular Support (MCCS) and focus on four elements of integration: Academic, Social, Professional, and University. Using the MCCS as the framework, this study examines how first-year engineering commuter students are integrated academically, socially, and professionally into a regional university in the mid-west during COVID-19. For this study, we have one research question to examine: During COVID, to what extent do commuter students differ in integration compared to residential students? To answer this question, 146 students in the first-year engineering program gave consent to use their survey responses on the engineering student integration instrument, which is a valid and reliable survey instrument containing 22 questions across four integration constructs (e.g., academic, social, professional, and university). Data are presented for each of the four integration constructs and areas for improvement are discussed. Results show no significant differences for each of the four integration constructs between commuter and residential engineering students. Multiple reasons for this are discussed as well as implications for first-year programs that cater to commuter students in engineering. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Towards Reliable Remote Health Monitoring in Fog Computing Networks

As the World is still facing the COVID-19 pandemic, several researchers and industry players have proposed technological solutions to help fight the pandemic and pave the way for post-pandemic era precautions. In this matter, the potential benefits of remote health monitoring have been brought back to the spotlight. Indeed, with current advances in wireless communications, core network virtualization, and computing architectures as enablers, consistently guaranteeing the stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of remote health monitoring, e.g., ultra-low latency, may be achievable. Notably, the fog computing (FC) paradigm has been advocated as a potential solution for remote health monitoring. However, the unreliability of fog nodes in FC networks is a critical aspect often overlooked despite its significant impact on vital latency requirements. This paper proposes a reliable fog-based remote health monitoring framework operating under uncertain fog computing conditions. Specifically, we formulate the problem of assigning tasks of remote sensors attached to patients to their adequate applications deployed in fog nodes aiming to maximize the number of satisfied tasks with respect to the fog nodes’availability and communication latency constraints. Due to the problem’s NP-hardness, we leverage a differential evolution-based algorithm enhanced by reinforcement learning to deploy applications in fog nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the superior reliability performance of our proposed solution, in terms of the average success ratio of tasks, compared to benchmarks. Specifically, our simulations show up to 60 % performance improvement compared to benchmarks in specific scenarios. Moreover, by investigating the impact of several key parameters, we identify a design trade-off between the number of fog nodes and the latter’s intrinsic failure rates. IEEE

Aerial Drone use for Sustainable Development in India-A Content Blog Analysis

India urgently requires technological solutions to resolve its pressing sustainability issues. The study, therefore, analyzed published blog content to explore how drones were being used to promote the United Nations sustainable development goals in India. Blog entries were retrieved through the Google search engine and screened to select 35 blogs, which contained sustainable drone applications and drone operation policies in India. Blogs published from 2016 to 2021 were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using a phenomenological approach. The study identified four themes and ten sub-themes related to drone use for sustainability in India. Themes included drone applications for sustainable management of natural resources, drone use for sustainable agriculture, drone implementation for other sustainability purposes, such as biodiversity conservation, and rules and regulations for drone use that enhance sustainability. The study recommends commercializing India's drone industry to promote research on finding solutions to sustainability issues in various sectors. © 2022 IEEE.

Violation Detection Technique for COVID-19 Self-Isolation and Control Measures using Wireless and Geofencing Technologies

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic forced the governments to apply severe control measures such as lockdowns and quarantines. This lead to the need for innovative digital health technological solutions to increase the effectiveness of the necessary precautionary. In this regard, a smart geofencing solution is proposed in this paper to effectively support the implementation of COVID-19 self-isolation and control measures in different areas where each intended area is defined as a geofence with specific control actions. The proposed solution is based on a mobile client application that exploits specific wireless metrics for Wi-Fi and cellular networks to generate a digital signature for the defined geofence and detects any violation of its virtual borders. A detailed description along with a mathematical model of how the geofence digital signature can be created is presented. Then, a geofence matching criterion based on a weighted score is proposed to detect the geofence violation by comparing the periodically measured wireless metrics with the created geofence digital signature. The proposed solution can be used for detecting violation in different cases such as distributed home quarantine and controlled areas. The performance of the proposed solution is studied on different scenarios, and the results show the significance of the proposed solution compared to others. Moreover, the effect of the decision time window parameter on the performance of the proposed geofence matching criterion is illustrated. © 2022 IEEE.

The Use of Cloud Firestore for Handling Real-time Data Updates: An Empirical Study of Gamified Online Quiz

The need for technological solutions that can help improve interactivity in online learning environments is increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic. One technological solution that has been proven is the use of gamified online quizzes such as Kahoot!. One of the issues when using existing third-party platforms is related to integration with existing learning platforms. Institutions that have sufficient resources can solve this by developing solutions that are easily integrated with existing learning platforms. This paper discusses how to use database technology that can handle real-time data updates to develop a gamified online quiz system. In this experimental study, UML use cases and sequence diagrams were used to describe the functional requirements and behavior of the system. Further, entity-relationship model was also used to help the database implementation process. Two database technologies, namely Cloud Firestore and CouchDB, were compared to see how they perform in handling real-time data updates and how much they cost. The comparison results show that Cloud Firestore is better in terms of latency and more cost-effective than CouchDB. © 2021 IEEE.

Artificial Intelligence applications addressing different aspects of the Covid-19 crisis and key technological solutions for future epidemics control

Artificial intelligence (AI) development and its application in human life are continuing at an astounding rate. Among the variety of examples of AI being used for a variety of tasks, its contribution to epidemic control has recently captured a great deal of interest at the time of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis that occurred due to the Coronavirus spread. As the entire world has been concerning over urgent efforts addressing the damaging effects since the outbreak, Artificial Intelligence emerged as a great possible solution. This study is aimed at examining how artificial intelligence gets us ready to combat and control COVID-19 and other future pandemics, as this is unlikely to be the last of the epidemics. Moreover, several key technological solutions are outlined that could help combat future pandemics and make us prepared. As a result, technology development can be promoted to overcome any possible unexpected subsequent crisis. © 2021 IEEE.

Towards Business Process Intelligence to Port2Port Governance Responsibility based on Learning Algorithms

This paper provides an approach to Port2Port Business Process Intelligence (BPIs) helping decision makers in tackling constant changes in governance responsibilities. This consideration leads to the need for Port2Port technological solutions among ports and development of capabilities on sharing information, planning and execution in a collaborative way. It is offered three Port2Port BPIs: 1) Control process for greenhouse gas emissions coming from ships, 2) The process for monitoring ballast Waters, 3) Sanitation Performance Compliance under COVID19 situation. The identification and selection of learning tasks have been integrated into the conceptualisation scheme, suggesting the exploitation of Deep reinforcement Learning (RL) to capture important aspects of the real problem facing the learning agents interacting with its environment to achieve the proposed goals. © 2021 IEEE.

Challenges of E-commerce Adoption within a Namibian Conglomerate

Electronic-commerce (e-commerce) has evolved since its inception in the nineties, and it is still evolving with the growth of new technological solutions [1]. Globally, e-commerce has revolutionized the trading industry [2]. However, in Namibia, the infiltration of e-commerce is still in the infancy stage [3]. The country is gradually moving into the fourth industrial revolution with pockets of businesses still unfamiliar with e-commerce. Pundits postulate that most companies will have to face e-commerce as the future of their businesses [4], especially now with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the nature of business operations globally. Moreover, in Namibia, there is a general lack of literature on the topic of e-commerce adoption, the challenges for adoption, and the influence of ecommerce knowledge on the adoption. This paper presents a case study conducted in a Namibian conglomerate that aimed to discover the challenges of e-commerce adoption unique to this Namibian organization focusing only on the aspect of buying and selling tangible products online. Quantitative data was collected through an online survey and interpreted using descriptive statistical data analysis. The findings show that there is no point of reference for the adoption of e-commerce, the challenge of decision-makers is congruent with knowledge of ecommerce and the ideology of supplying products that cannot be traded online. © 2021 IEEE.

BEVDS: A Blockchain Model for Multiparty Authentication of COVID-19 Vaccine Beneficiary

COVID-19 vaccinations have been approved for public immunization and are going through clinical trials. Vaccinating a billion people of India is a huge challenge. Tracing, last mile delivery, data privacy, double spend of dosage, and multiparty authorization pose serious challenges for providing COVID-19 vaccines. Policies have been framed on who gets the access to the vaccine. However, there is a need of a technological solution to create an efficient vaccine distribution or delivery system. This paper proposes a novel blockchain enabled vaccine delivery system in the context of India. A consortium blockchain has been proposed which has different participants, like the UIDAI, healthcare facilities, pharmaceutical supply chain, etc. These participants are responsible for authenticating the beneficiary of the COVID-19 vaccine. Sequence diagram of how the beneficiary is authorized to access the vaccine has been proposed. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

An Analysis of User Profiles from Covid-19 Questions in Stack Overflow

The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes in society, with one of the most important being an explosion of software development concerning technological solutions for combatting its crippling effects. In this global crisis, many software enthusiasts, combined with seasoned developers and specialists turned their attention to Questions and Answers platforms such as Stack Overflow to expand their knowledge and ask questions regarding their COVID-19 related solutions. This paper examines the different characteristics of these users, dividing them into Newcomers and Oldcomers and pinpoints popularity differences, scientific and technological backgrounds by analyzing key technologies, as well as the role of gender in their participation. © 2021 ACM.

CoviDefender: Digital Personal Guard for Defending Against COVID19

In late 31 December 2019, a cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases was reported in Wuhan, China [1]. A few days later, the causative agent of this mysterious pneumonia was identified as the new COVID-19 virus. Currently, it has been spreading for more than one and a half years and has lost a huge number of lives all over the world. Most people faced this disaster because of their ignorance, carelessness and lack of updates. By the way most people are in lack of knowledge regarding COVID-19 pandemic, symptoms and what should do to survive from that. Those issues are great problems nowadays. 'CoviDefender' is set to offer a solution to this worldwide COVID-19 pandemic problem. This is a new technological solution from a mobile application. 'CoviDefender' is a Smart Assistant for Defending against COVID-19 Pandemic. This can be described as a solution to the ignorance and carelessness of the people who have been the main cause of the spread of this epidemic. © 2021 IEEE.