ABSTRACT
The emergence of the e-learning culture has taken the world by storm, and its trend has only increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. Being confined at home, students and educators are forced to transition to online learning no matter their familiarity or skill level with technology. One such issue is when a website is not designed effectively, making it needlessly complicated. On the other hand, taking away the complexity of a site may cause it to lack the information presented. To overcome this, an e-learning website should be designed using a design thinking approach that centers around creative problem solving to better innovate a solution. This paper aims to delve deeper into how the design thinking approach may improve an e-learning website's design. The results of the research that we have done show that the application of design thinking in our e-learning has the highest score in the navigation aspect and is also user-friendly, with a score of 8.1 (out of 10). While the lowest score is in the use of color with a score of 6.9 (out of 10), from these results, we need to improve in aspect use of color. This proves that the application of design thinking in e-learning is necessary to facilitate and assist users in using the application © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Over 3 years, we are living under various restrictions due to the covid'19 pandemic. First, was the lockdown, then authorities allow people to go outside for a very limited duration. Second, the obligation of wearing a facemask to protect ourselves and others. Third, after being vaccinated with three shots, everyone has a vaccination passport or some call it a Health pass. This pass allows people to go whatever they want and to travel outside the country. We build a complete application able to manage and monitor: 1/ Social Distance, 2/ Facemask detection, and 3/ check the vaccination passport. We use deep learning models to do classification and detection. The resulting application is very flexible and user-friendly. Also, it could be used anywhere;schools, universities, public spaces, private buildings, etc. We tested our application with various devices including Raspberry Pi, wireless camera, and laptop. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Increasing student engagement and improving learning outcomes are ongoing issues in higher education worldwide. These issues were particularly pertinent during the COVID-19 pandemic when remote learning was selected as the primary instructional learning setting. This study aims to assess the impact of gamification-based quiz instruction in driving college students' learning in an online class during the COVID-19 pandemic at a remote institution of higher education in Indonesia (n = 68). The study employs an explanatory sequential mixed-method approach, including quasi-experimental research, quantitative surveys, and qualitative interviews. The findings indicate that the overall result of the four tests conducted during the intervention indicates a statistically significant difference among the three groups. The gamification-based quizzes increase student enthusiasm and improve learning outcomes. The study demonstrates the transformation induced by the ease of use and low cost of digital gaming platforms from mundane activities, such as listening to lectures on Zoom, to enjoyable educational gaming activities. The weekly gamification-based formative assessments using easy-to-use media significantly increase student engagement, critical and creative thinking, and information literacy during the learning process. © 2023, Education Research Institute, Seoul National University.
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The world is facing the global challenge of COVID-19 pandemics, which is a topic of great concern.It is a contagious disease and infects others very fast.Artificial intelligence (AI) can assist healthcare professionals in assessing disease risks, assisting in diagnosis, prescribing medication, forecasting future well, and may be helpful in the current situation.Designing, a user-friendly Web application-based diagnosis model framework, is more useful in health care.The study focuses on a Web-based model for diagnosing the COVID-19 patients without direct contact with the patient.Chest CT scans have been important for the testing and diagnosing of COVID-19 disease.The Web-based model would take inputs, CT scan images, and users' symptoms and display classification results: NON-COVID-19 or COVID-19 infected. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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Video conferencing software has become an essential tool for communicating with one another across long distances. There are several video conferencing software that are utilised for communication all over the world. Huge numbers of people are unable to interact via spoken language and find typical video conferencing solutions difficult to use. Our project intends to solve this problem by creating a user-friendly Video Conferencing App that can identify sign language in real time and provide correct subtitles. Due to a lack of communication skills, deaf and hard of hearing persons confront several obstacles in their everyday lives. The covid epidemic has made traditional ways of communication extremely challenging for these people. Our goal is to bridge the gap by giving them a platform to showcase their skills. © 2022 IEEE.
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As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for remote computer connection has drastically increased. This need is also anticipated to increase in the future as many institutes allow working remotely. This paper reports on a development of a software called “iCtrl”, which started in late 2020. iCtrl is a desktop remote-control application that allows remote connection to an institute's computer facilities. iCtrl application supports Virtual Network Computing (VNC) connection on both Windows and macOS operating systems. It offers a user-friendly interface to eliminate complicated setup processes. iCtrl has been used for over two years and received positive ratings from undergraduate students in a first-year programming language course and a third-year computer network course. Feedback provided by students suggested a few potential improvements such as cross-platform support and Secure Shell (SSH) connections. This motivated us to design a web-based version for iCtrl in summer 2021 that supported cross-OS platform access, SSH and VNC connection, while providing an industry-leading file management interface design with reference to Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. This allowed not only to transfer responsibilities of platform support to the browser developers but also to design a more intuitive interface for the students to upload, retrieve and manage files using the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). The latest survey noted an 86.2% approval of our application over the traditional methods, and the download count of the application is now 10 times of the old version after we applied engineering practices. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
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Communication promotes the flow of information between the people of different cultures present all over the world. As a result, it is critical that whatever one wishes to communicate with another is readily comprehended. The world is a place for people with a variety of abilities not just cultural differences. Differently abled people, who are unable to orally convey their thoughts and ideas find it challenging to communicate. This communication barrier has resulted in lack of self-development and social inequity among people with disabilities, especially the deaf-mute population. This article focuses on bridging this communication gap using a sensor-based, user-friendly, real-time solution based on Indian Sign Language (ISL) gestures. Furthermore New Education Policy, July 2020 has standardized Indian Sign Language (ISL) as a common language to interact, understand and simplify day to day communication for deaf-dumb community. The proposed method primarily focuses on ISL gestures, which are used to communicate about the current covid-19 pandemic situation and necessary precautions to combat the further spread of the covid19 infection. © 2022 IEEE.
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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.
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COVID 19 situation is a big blow to students specially undergraduates wherein they severely suffered and are restricted to the online classes. Core subjects in electronics and communication engineering requires hardware laboratories wherein the theoretical explanation is made clearer by practical implementations. Analog communication is supposed to be the fundamental core subject of electronics with hardware lab wherein student can have a clear idea of various modulated waveforms. In this situation when all are restricted to homes a user-friendly solution came up, an open-source software tool wherein students and faculties can implement all hardware related experiments easily. Scilab is a replacement for licensed software such as MATLAB with simple syntax which can be easily understood. In this paper scilab codes are developed for various modulation techniques such as amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) which can be used to make the students comfortable with the concepts of modulation. A feedback survey was taken by the undergraduate students of electronics and communication engineering and it clearly shows that students are interested and comfortable in using scilab programming and wished to use this tool while implementing major project. © 2022 IEEE.
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Medical advances have allowed people to live longer and this has presented different challenges to support them to keep living independently at home. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the situation with less care staff and resources available for the elderly, which have also been spending more time at their homes without external contact. Elderly people are typically looked after by formal (professional carers) and informal (relatives and friends) carers. The work of carers has been increasingly supported using technologies for communication and wellbeing monitoring of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) that elderly people perform in order to detect abnormal events that could negatively affect their wellbeing. This paper presents the design of a rule-based and ADL analysis system that takes data from different sensors as input and presents a number of visualisations in a dashboard as output. The dashboard is as user friendly as possible for both formal and informal carers of elderly people. It is intended that the proposed system can identify both immediate problems, but also trends and deviations from the individual’s norm, or that of a comparable cohort, which indicate the opportunity for pro-active care. This research has been done in collaboration with the Kraydel company, whose staff supported with ideas and with the commercial needs to be considered in the solution design presented in this paper. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
ABSTRACT
Virtual reality tours have become a desire for many educational institutions due to the potential difficulties for students to attend in person, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having the ability for a student to explore the buildings and locations on a university campus is a crucial part of convincing them to enroll in classes. Many institutions have already installed tour applications that they have either designed themselves or contracted to a third party. However, they lack a convenient way for non-maintainers, such as faculty, to manage and personalize their classrooms and offices in a simple way. In this paper, we propose a platform to not only provide a full virtual experience of the campus but also feature a user-friendly content management system designed for staff and faculty to customize their assigned scenes. The tour uses the Unity3D engine, which communicates to a university server hosting a custom.NET API and SQL database to obtain information about the virtual rooms through a role-based access system to the faculty and staff. We believe this system for managing tour scenes will solve both time and expense for the tour development team and allow them to focus on implementing other features, rather than having to fulfill requests for editing locations in the tour. We expect this framework to function as a tour platform for other universities, as well as small businesses and communities. We seek to demonstrate the feasibility of this platform through our developed prototype application. Based on small sample testing, we have received overall positive responses and constructive critique that has played a role in improving the application moving forward. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Hospitals worldwide are struggling to cope up with patient’s admission issues related with the increasing number of COVID-19 patients’ cases mainly driven by Delta variant, as severely ill nCOVID patients are found waiting for hospital beds, which are occupied by non-critical COVID patients. To make the situation worse, people who are partially or fully vaccinated against COVID-19 are also getting re-infected. Due to the absence of prior knowledge of an index of severity for COVID-19 patients, hospitals, with limited number of ventilators and medical equipment, fail to admit patients on any priority basis. With multiple tests kit available in market till now, there is none with an instantaneous index for severity prediction for COVID. This research develops a free and user-friendly algorithm titled “SAHAYATA 1427” (renamed herein Sahayata) which predicts a factor for a patient having the probability of disease nCOVID-19 termed as “probability factor” of COVID-19 for each patient. Concurrently, the algorithm also provides an index for severity by which the patient is affected by nCOVID, termed as “severity index.” The input data is both demographic and patient provided. The severity index is determined using artificial intelligence. Using a logistic regression model with data set of existing COVID patients, Sahayata predicts the probability factor for an nCOVID-19 patient with an accuracy, precision and recall of 88.17%, 100% and 87.3%, respectively. Results indicate that it can be used effectively both at hospitals by trained medical personnel and at home by the general population. Sahayata helps the COVID-19 patients living in rural communities with smaller patients care facilities with limited equipment by providing a way for efficient treatment care. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Since the inception of Internet of Things (IoT) and AI (Artificial Intelligence), there has been a vast development in modern technology. There is no doubt IoT, and AI have been universal dais for Internet-associated smart and intelligent devices which is touted to boost supply chain integration. This paper aims to review the increased role and importance of IoT and artificial intelligence in supply chain management during the Covid pandemic. Recently we all have witnessed that due to the covid-19 the whole world has been under locked down and witnessing a great problem for buying the daily essentials as social distancing must be maintained. Covid has disrupted the production supply chain, finance, and markets. There is an outpouring in the usage of online shopping making pressure to enhance process efficiency for future needs. The advent of industry 4.0 has given rise to the implementation of modern technologies into Supply Chain Management. The use of IoT and AI makes the shopping experience much better, more user-friendly, with alleviated customer service with end-to-end supply chain performance, or improved supply chain availability, clarity, and authenticity during the pandemic. The chapter focuses on the impact of IoT and AI on overall supply chain and how the technologies are helping to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the supply chain system. © 2021 IEEE.
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In India, Agriculture plays an imperative role in the development of our country. More than 50% of entirety populace of India is directly or indirectly depends on agriculture and the agronomist are the backbone of the agronomic diligence but the agricultural backdrop facing decades-long tribulations and unpredicted challenges that are so critical to resolve. Some of the major issues that agronomist finding hard is water scarcity, soil erosion, lack of market intellect, poor quality of seeds, usage of fertilizers, inadequate knowledge on preserving soil for further cultivation etc. In addition to this, due to Covid19, still more problems faced by farmers are shortage of agri-inputs, lack of laborers and transportation of farm products. In order to rectify some of the agricultural tribulations, this paper has been primed as an effort to re-evaluate the study on the significance of deep learning techniques in the domain of agro crop yield production and rainfall-temperature forecasting with respect to density. The objective is to build an application that is user-friendly for the agronomist suggesting legitimate crop selection fine points according to the crop year, zone, season, soil nutrient on their farm which hikes the yield of the crops devoid of fertilizers and preserving the soil composition without degradation as well. This work integrates finding soil nutrients such as Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorous. The input parameters considered for predicting the crop are likely the district, the crop year and the previous crop planted. Based on the survey, Artificial Neural Networks(ANN), Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), Decision Tree, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Random Forest and Support Vector Machine(SVM) classification models are the best models to predict accurate values and obtained the optimized results. © 2021 IEEE.
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A person who is physically, mentally, and socially fit is known as a healthy person. However, only 45% of people pass the criteria of being healthy. Approximately 25% of people in India are suffering from mental disorders and are mentally unfit. The current scenario and the lockdowns have increased the rates from 17.5% in March 2020 to 25% in March 2021. Stress has always been an integral part of human life. But with the rising age of digitisation, stress coping abilities are deteriorating, and mental health issues are increasing worldwide, especially among young adults. Mental health has become a significant concern, which needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. According to a survey, many deaths during the covid resulted from anxiety, panic, and mental weakness. Technology is proliferating, but problems like Mental health and cure are still technologically handicapped. Music is known for its healing beauty. It has profound psychophysical effects and can act as a great stress reliever. Integrating music and technology in the right manner can enhance psychological and physical health, which in turn increases brain plasticity. This paper proposes a device that uses non-invasive neurotechnology in acquiring any mental state, from heightened alertness to deep rest. The device uses auditory brain stimulation and neurofeedback technology in achieving so.Binaural Beat possesses brainwave entrainment properties, making it an excellent stimulus in designing this Auditory Brain-Computer Interface. The salient feature of this device is the usage of real-time EEG neurofeedback in producing a personalised binaural beat track for the user. The binaural beat track is structured to help the user smoothly achieve a particular mental state, providing a pleasant experience. Not only that, the experience becomes more harmonious with the integration of the Fibonacci and the Golden Ratio. The device escalates the benefits of binaural beats as the real-time EEG feedback reduces the occurrence of dizziness caused by the beats. Hence, creating an effective system to improve the cognitive functioning of the user. © 2021 IEEE.
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The setup of automated hardware-in-the-loop test bench is proposed in this paper.The proposed embedded system performed very important role in COVID-19 situation. Following social distancing rules and work from home scenarios becomes very easy due to development of this system.For in-house development of this embedded solution, Arduino UNO is the main hardware used to automate the manual test benches.Furthermore to operate the required functions such as power on/off, battery on/off and key switch on/off, MATLAB GUI (Graphical User Interface) is developed and application is created for it to make it user friendly. The main drawbacks of the manual-Test-Bench setups are they are time-consuming, complex, not user friendly and there are chances of manual errors also. Automated test bench setups have advantages of reduced testing time, no manual efforts in comparison to manual test bench setups. Results are provided to show the successful implementation and merits of the proposed automated hardware-in-the-loop test bench setup. © 2021 IEEE.
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A study has been conducted to evaluate the virtual reality technology and online teaching system among medical students of Bogomolets NationalMedical University, Ukraine during COVID-19 pandemic. The final questionnairecontained the 15 questions with 5 options to comprehensively evaluate thevirtual reality technology and online teaching system. The feedback of the surveywas analyzed to find effectiveness of virtual reality technology and online teachingin medical education in Ukraine. Data of survey reflected that mostly studentsadopted and agreed on virtual reality technology and online teaching and admittedthat these technologies are best alternatives to physical learning with the65.79% an agreement with the user-friendly interface for virtual reality andonline teaching system, while, 64.03% showed an agreement that virtual realityand online teaching system compensated the suspension of face-to-face medicaleducation during the COVID-19. During online learning, there was ample timefor educational activities as depicted from their response of 36.84% as stronglyagree, 35.96% as agree, 6.14% as disagree, 4.39% as strongly disagree and16.67% as neither agree nor disagree. Tutors/teachers also enjoyed virtual realityand online learning through their experience and flexibility in time management.Likewise, the results of all questions showed positive reviews and encouragedvirtual reality and online teaching in academic continuity and stability in medicaleducation in Ukraine. It can be concluded that digital learning environments areextremely effective in terms of medical students and staff satisfaction, accomplishment,and technical learning skill growth © 2021. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning. All Rights Reserved.
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Coronavirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerases produce subgenomic RNAs (sgRNAs) that encode viral structural and accessory proteins. User-friendly bioinformatic tools to detect and quantify sgRNA production are urgently needed to study the growing number of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data of SARS-CoV-2. We introduced sgDI-tector to identify and quantify sgRNA in SARS-CoV-2 NGS data. sgDI-tector allowed detection of sgRNA without initial knowledge of the transcription-regulatory sequences. We produced NGS data and successfully detected the nested set of sgRNAs with the ranking M > ORF3a > N>ORF6 > ORF7a > ORF8 > S > E>ORF7b. We also compared the level of sgRNA production with other types of viral RNA products such as defective interfering viral genomes.
Subject(s)
Computational Biology/methods , Genome, Viral , RNA, Viral/genetics , SARS-CoV-2/genetics , High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing , Open Reading FramesABSTRACT
Social distancing has become a necessity due to COVID-19, requiring schools to reduce classroom capacities to host in-person students. In doing so, schools seek to maximize the number of seats that can be used within a classroom, while ensuring that no pair of usable seats violates social distancing guidelines. We model this problem as a graph-theoretic maximum independent set problem and develop a user-friendly tool that solves real instances of the problem. We then use that tool to create optimal classroom seating plans for a major university. Our core model considers the case of a classroom with fixed seats. This problem can be expressed as a graph, identifying seats as nodes and inserting edges between seats that are closer than some prescribed threshold. A maximum independent set in this graph corresponds to an optimal seating plan. Our seat assignment tool allows any user to solve this problem by uploading an architect's drawing of a classroom. Then, computer vision aids the user by locating seats, and the tool finds and prints an optimal plan. Our tool also allows users to easily incorporate additional requirements, such as designated teacher spaces and the inclusion of movable chairs. Our tool helped automate the classroom planning process at Cornell University where its ease of use allowed it to be run on hundreds of classrooms. Compared to initial reduced-capacity classroom estimates determined by the Office of the University Architect, it helped identify over 400 additional seats that could be used. © 2021 IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2021. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic and its virus variants continue to pose a serious and long-lasting threat worldwide. To combat the pandemic, the world's largest COVID-19 vaccination campaign is currently ongoing. As of July 19th 2021, 26.2% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine (1.04 billion), and one billion has been fully vaccinated, with very high vaccination rates in countries like Israel, Malta, and the UEA. Conversely, only 1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose with examples of vaccination frequency as low as 0.07% in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is thus of paramount importance that more research on alternate methods to counter cell infection and propagation is undertaken that could be implemented in low-income countries. Moreover, an adjunctive therapeutic intervention would help to avoid disease exacerbation in high-rate vaccinated countries too. Based on experimental biochemical evidence on viral cell fusion and propagation, herein we identify (i) extracellular pH (epH), (ii) temperature, and (iii) humidity and osmolarity as critical factors. These factors are here in discussed along with their implications on mucus thick layer, proteases, abundance of sialic acid, vascular permeability and exudate/edema. Heated, humidified air containing sodium bicarbonate has long been used in the treatment of certain diseases, and here we argue that warm inhalation of sodium bicarbonate might successfully target these endpoints. Although we highlight the molecular/cellular basis and the signalling pathways to support this intervention, we underscore the need for clinical investigations to encourage further research and clinical trials. In addition, we think that such an approach is also important in light of the high mutation rate of this virus originating from a rapid increase.