Understanding information (in)equity: influencing factors and medical information's role in bridging the gap.

Medical Information in the pharmaceutical industry involves the creation and dissemination of evidence-based scientific medical content in response to questions about medicines and therapy areas for patients and healthcare professionals. Health information equity can be broadly defined as the distribution of health information in a way that is accessible and understandable to all users, allowing them to benefit and reach their full potential for health. Ideally, this information would be made available to all those in need across the globe. However, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread health discrepancies exist. The World Health Organization defines health inequity as differences in health status or in the distribution of health resources between different population groups. Health inequities are influenced by the social conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. This article explains select key factors influencing health information inequity and addresses opportunities where Medical Information departments can make a difference to improve global public health.

Misinformation Detection Using Unsupervised Approach on CoAID Dataset

COVID-19 has had an impact on everyone's life. People have slowly moved online for information access regarding COVID-19. This resulted in a large amount of misinformation spread among the people. This has a widespread impact on business, economy, education, and various other factors of society. Recent research techniques have developed models to detect COVID-19 misinformation using a mainly supervised learning approach that demands a labeled dataset. Several datasets have been generated since the COVID-19 pandemic using social media and web platforms. However, considering the large amount of information generated online with unstructured, incomplete, and noisy data, it is difficult to obtain labeled data for supervised learning. Therefore, in this research authors have proposed an unsupervised learning technique using k-means with a domain-specific sentimental bagof-words on the CoAID dataset. CoAID dataset has been created during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and is popular and widely used. Initially, the authors have done an extensive analysis of the literature based on the CoAID dataset to explore the various techniques developed on this dataset. Further, a k-means clustering algorithm is employed with six different distance measures viz. Euclidean, Squared Euclidean, Chi-square, Canberra, Chebychav, and Manhattan. The Elbow method is used to identify the optimal number of clusters. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model authors have used various metrics like purity, precision, silhouette score, word clouds, and sentiment analysis. The model showed a purity score of 0.96 and a precision of 1 for k=2. © 2022 IEEE.

Powering an AI Chatbot with Expert Sourcing to Support Credible Health Information Access

During a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, a credible and easy-to-access information portal is highly desirable. It helps with disease prevention, public health planning, and misinformation mitigation. However, creating such an information portal is challenging because 1) domain expertise is required to identify and curate credible and intelligible content, 2) the information needs to be updated promptly in response to the fast-changing environment, and 3) the information should be easily accessible by the general public;which is particularly difficult when most people do not have the domain expertise about the crisis. In this paper, we presented an expert-sourcing framework and created Jennifer, an AI chatbot, which serves as a credible and easy-to-access information portal for individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jennifer was created by a team of over 150 scientists and health professionals around the world, deployed in the real world and answered thousands of user questions about COVID-19. We evaluated Jennifer from two key stakeholders' perspectives, expert volunteers and information seekers. We first interviewed experts who contributed to the collaborative creation of Jennifer to learn about the challenges in the process and opportunities for future improvement. We then conducted an online experiment that examined Jennifer's effectiveness in supporting information seekers in locating COVID-19 information and gaining their trust. We share the key lessons learned and discuss design implications for building expert-sourced and AI-powered information portals, along with the risks and opportunities of misinformation mitigation and beyond. © 2023 Owner/Author.

COVID-19 lockdown, information access and use among African diaspora in Norway

This chapter takes up the discourse on marginalisation and 'othering' surrounding information and communication among the African diaspora in Norway during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. Following the Norwegian Health Directorate (FHI)'s (2020, 2021) concerns about the statistically higher number of infections among immigrant groups, the chapter unpacks the dynamics surrounding this group's information access and use during lockdown. The chapter explores 'public institution' informational initiatives targeting immigrants at local levels and experiences of individual immigrants outside the public institution. Theories on media representation, otherness and trans-national communication were harnessed to analyse data generated qualitatively. While individual experiences were fragmented and diverse, 'otherness' and disadvantage on the basis of socio-cultural, economic and political marginality emerged with nuances depending on stratified contexts such as age, educational, nationality, religion. Public institutional efforts were experienced as necessary and valuable but insufficient in fully combating fear, uncertainty and confusion among the immigrants. These, mainly top-down interpretations of national and local directives and statistics, were thus supplemented with alternative and contra sources of information to feed fragmented immigrant informational needs. © 2022 by Carol Azungi Dralega, Yam Bahadur Katuwal and Henry Mainsah.

Exploring the Role of Infodemics in People's Incompliance with Preventive Measures during the COVID-19 in Conflict Settings (Mixed Method Study).

The evolving availability of health information on social media, regardless of its credibility, raises several questions about its impact on our health decisions and social behaviors, especially during health crises and in conflict settings where compliance with preventive measures and health guidelines is already a challenge due to socioeconomic factors. For these reasons, we assessed compliance with preventive measures and investigated the role of infodemic in people's non-compliance with COVID-19 containment measures in Yemen. To this purpose and to triangulate our data collection, we executed a mixed method approach in which raw aggregated data were taken and analyzed from multiple sources (COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports), then complemented and verified with In-depth interviews. Our results showed that the population in Yemen had relatively complied with the governmental containment measures at the beginning of the pandemic. However, containment measures were not supported by daily COVID-19 reports due to low transparency, which, together with misinformation and lack of access to reliable sources, has caused the population not to believe in COVID-19 and even practice social pressure on those who showed some compliance with the WHO guidelines. Those results indicate the importance of adopting an infodemic management approach in response to future outbreaks, particularly in conflict settings.

Risk communication and community engagement: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic

Information is a form of assistance in itself. Access to accurate information can allow people to make informed decisions to protect themselves. Moreover, understanding drivers of behaviour and integrating that understanding into communication approaches can make information more likely to result in desired action. Preparedness and response activities should be based on protection and related "do no harm" principles and conducted in a participatory manner that is informed by community feedback. Communication efforts must respond to stakeholder concerns, mis/disinformation and behavioral factors. Transparent and consistent messaging in local languages through trusted channels can help address barriers to change. Furthermore, by using community-based networks, engaging key influencers and building local capacities, communication can more effectively mitigate risks to more efficiently establish the authority and trust required to rapidly mount responses. Hence, Risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) refers to the processes and approaches to systematically consult, engage and communicate with communities who are at risk, or whose practices affect risk. The aim is to encourage, enable and include stakeholders in the prevention of and response to risks by adapting communication to local realities. In the case of COVID-19, RCCE enables authorities and communities to work together to promote healthy behaviour and reduce the risk of spreading infectious diseases. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) developed this guidance note to support Pillar IV of the country-level activities under the framework of FAO's component of the Global Humanitarian Response Plan for COVID-19: "Ensuring food supply chain actors are not at risk of COVID 19 transmission" through risk communication and community engagement (RCCE), together with the World Health Organization (WHO) and national authorities. In alignment with the Organization's commitments on Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP), this guidance note aims to support country offices in designing and implementing inclusive RCCE initiatives.

Web based Augmented Reality for Information Delivery Services A Performance Study

Augmented Reality (AR) is the overlapping of the real world and the virtual world. AR is an evolving technology, and its implementation opens up a new direction to multiple types of information access services rendered to the users. The digital library section of the central library IIT Kharagpur has a rich collection of several items like CD/DVD ROMs, Digital Scanners, and VR Devices. Library developed in-house WebAR programs using "ar.js” that support "three.js” and "A-Frame” for Augmented Reality rendering on the web. This study tried to evaluate web-based AR programs' performance on mobile devices with low-end hardware configuration supporting WebGL and WebRTC. We conducted quantitative research to find the performance of the web-based AR applications using the four independent variables, namely frames per second (fps), request animation frame (raf), load time (lt), entity object (eo). The paper is also helpful to the academic librarians who think about implementing augmented reality library services with no cost involved. The AR-based information service is beneficial to library users with new COVID norms1, as the user does not need to touch anything to get the information. Instead, it gets into his/ her mobile device.

Public information needs during the COVID-19 outbreak: a qualitative study in mainland China

PurposeThe impact of COVID-19 has led to a surge in the public's reliance on the Internet for pandemic information, and the policy of home isolation has exacerbated this. This study aimed to investigate public information needs and ways of accessing and disseminating information during COVID-19 in mainland China.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a qualitative research approach to conduct semi-structured interviews with 15 participants from 9 cities in mainland China about information needs and access behaviors during the COVID-19 outbreak. All interview recordings were converted into text and proofread, then coded and summarised in correspondence with the research questions using the grounded theory.FindingsThis study summarized the dynamics of public information needs during the 2.5-year pandemic and identified the difficulties in accessing certain information.Originality/valueAlthough information needs of public health emergencies have been a hot topic during COVID-19, scant studies focus on information needs in specific countries in Asia, especially in mainland China, the first country with a major outbreak and stringent lockdown mandates. Therefore, the current study is well enriched by focusing on information demand behavior in the context of COVID-19. Possible measures for improvement were also given to existing and potential problems, taking into account the participants' views.

Home working at a public university due to the COVID-19 pandemic: challenges and opportunities.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary to rapidly adapt ways of working, forcing adoption of home working, and public higher education institutions were no exception to this trend. Objectives: To analyze the initial phase of implementation of emergency teleworking at a public university, including its ramifications and repercussions for workers. Methods: This article constitutes a narrative account of the university's experience with teleworking, evaluated by analysis of a report produced by the institution after a survey of the needs of workers assigned to emergency teleworking because of the health crisis. Report of the experience: The analysis identified both opportunities and challenges created by the experience, which involved 50% of the institution's workers who were assigned to this modality of working. The most important opportunities were a perception of increased productivity compared to on-site working and improvements in quality of life and mental health. In counterpoint, barriers observed included worsening of mental health symptoms in the majority of workers who already had some type of mental disorder before the pandemic, work overload, difficulties with reconciling work routines with domestic activities, and a lack of the conditions and training needed to work from home. Conclusions: It should be emphasized that the various characteristics observed are related to the initial stages of adaptation to pandemic conditions and the new working routine. In counterpoint, some of the characteristics identified could offer important clues for continuation of teleworking and support for the university administration's planning for the future.

What a publication tells you - benefits of narrative information access in digital libraries

Knowledge bases allow effective access paths in digital libraries. Here users can specify their information need as graph patterns for precise searches and structured overviews (by allowing variables in queries). But especially when considering textual sources that contain narrative information, i.e., short stories of interest, harvesting statements from them to construct knowledge bases may be a serious threat to the statements' validity. A piece of information, originally stated in a coherent line of arguments, could be used in a knowledge base query processing without considering its vital context conditions. And this can lead to invalid results. That is why we argue to move towards narrative information access by considering contexts in the query processing step. In this way digital libraries can allow users to query for narrative information and supply them with valid answers. In this paper we define narrative information access, demonstrate its benefits for Covid 19 related questions, and argue on the generalizability for other domains such as political sciences. © 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.

Infosonics: Accessible Infographics for People who are Blind using Sonification and Voice

Data visualisations are increasingly used online to engage readers and enable independent analysis of the data underlying news stories. However, access to such infographics is problematic for readers who are blind or have low vision (BLV). Equitable access to information is a basic human right and essential for independence and inclusion. We introduce infosonics, the audio equivalent of infographics, as a new style of interactive sonification that uses a spoken introduction and annotation, non-speech audio and sound design elements to present data in an understandable and engaging way. A controlled user evaluation with 18 BLV adults found a COVID-19 infosonic enabled a clearer mental image than a traditional sonification. Further, infosonics prove complementary to text descriptions and facilitate independent understanding of the data. Based on our findings, we provide preliminary suggestions for infosonics design, which we hope will enable BLV people to gain equitable access to online news and information. © 2022 ACM.

Trends of Internet search about chlorine dioxide in eight Latin American countries during the COVID-19 pandemic

Infodemiology and infovigilance are computer methods for the analysis and monitoring of Internet data, and allow awareness of situations and creation of health policies. This study aimed to analyze the search trends for chlorine dioxide and equivalent terms on the Internet (chlorine dioxide solution, CDS;miracle mineral solution, MMS), in relation to COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in eight Latin American countries. Google Trends was used for this purpose;the period reviewed was from March 1st to November 25th 2020. The 7-day moving average for relative search volume (VRB), morbidity and mortality rate were calculated. For the association of quantitative variables, the Spearman correlation coefficient was used with a significance level p < 0.05. The country with the highest search interest was Bolivia;the one with the least interest, Brazil. The analysis of the VRB with the morbidity and mortality rate was different between countries. The maximum VRB peaks of Colombia and Chile, in April, and of Mexico, Ecuador and Bolivia, in July, coincided with the issuance of health alerts on chlorine dioxide. Most showed a moderate and low significant correlation between VRB and the number of confirmed cases and daily deaths from COVID-19. The behavior of the searches, differentiated between countries, could indicate greater interest in the topic of chlorine dioxide during the pandemic;this would be explained by the dissemination of health alerts from international, regional and local health agencies. © 2022, Centro Nacional de Informacion de Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.

A Study on E-Learning and Recommendation System

Introduction: Today, technology and internet both are proliferating due to which information access is becoming easier, and is creating new challenges and opportunities in all fields, especially when working in the field of education. For example, the e-learning education system can be personalized in order to acquire knowledge level and learner’s requirements in a learning process. The learning experience, as per the individual learner’s goals, should be adopted. Background: In the current educational environment, e-learning plays a significant role. For many researchers, it has become one of the most important subjects, as through the use of e-learning, the whole education system would revolutionize. There are many areas of e-learning in which research work is being carried out, such as Mass Communication, Information and Technology (IT), Education and Distance Education. Objectives: To meet the various needs of the learners such as talents, interests and goals an e-learning system needs to be designed as a personalized learning system by considering various educational experiences. Many methods such as ontologies, clustering, classification and association rules have been used along with filtering techniques to enhance the personalization and performance of the learner. Methods: This paper presents a detailed review of the literature of previous work that has been conducted in e-learning area, especially in the recommendation system. Current research works on e-learning has been discussed in this work in order to discover the research developments in this discipline. Conclusions: One of the vital functions of the current e-learning system is creating a personalized resource recommendation system. In this paper, we reviewed some crucial papers on both e-learning and recommendation systems. Future research work of this paper would be designing efficient and precise e-learning and recommendation system to deal with the problem of substantial personalized information resources as e-learning plays a vital role in preventing virus spread during COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 Bentham Science Publishers.

Addressing Privacy Concerns in Sharing Viral Sequences and Minimum Contextual Data in a Public Repository During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

COVID-19 was declared to be a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. Timely sharing of viral genomic sequencing data accompanied by a minimal set of contextual data is essential for informing regional, national, and international public health responses. Such contextual data is also necessary for developing, and improving clinical therapies and vaccines, and enhancing the scientific community's understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (CanCOGeN) was launched in April 2020 to coordinate and upscale existing genomics-based COVID-19 research and surveillance efforts. CanCOGeN is performing large-scale sequencing of both the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 virus samples (VirusSeq) and affected Canadians (HostSeq). This paper addresses the privacy concerns associated with sharing the viral sequence data with a pre-defined set of contextual data describing the sample source and case attribute of the sequence data in the Canadian context. Currently, the viral genome sequences are shared by provincial public health laboratories and their healthcare and academic partners, with the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory and with publicly accessible databases. However, data sharing delays and the provision of incomplete contextual data often occur because publicly releasing such data triggers privacy and data governance concerns. The CanCOGeN Ethics and Governance Expert Working Group thus has investigated several privacy issues cited by CanCOGeN data providers/stewards. This paper addresses these privacy concerns and offers insights primarily in the Canadian context, although similar privacy considerations also exist in other jurisdictions. We maintain that sharing viral sequencing data and its limited associated contextual data in the public domain generally does not pose insurmountable privacy challenges. However, privacy risks associated with reidentification should be actively monitored due to advancements in reidentification methods and the evolving pandemic landscape. We also argue that during a global health emergency such as COVID-19, privacy should not be used as a blanket measure to prevent such genomic data sharing due to the significant benefits it provides towards public health responses and ongoing research activities.

The impact of COVID-19 on migrant women in son Gotleu (Palma) and the development of outreach tools to improve health and social care.

AIMS: The objectives of this research protocol are as follows: to examine the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and social care for migrant women in the Son Gotleu district of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and to develop outreach tools to target this specific group. DESIGN: This is a qualitative study that uses content analysis to obtain in-depth knowledge of personal experience (manifest content) and contextual experience (latent content) in a specific social setting. METHODS: The study population are migrant women living in Son Gotleu district, who are segmented by their age and experience of COVID-19, defined as positive or negative according to whether or not they have been infected with the disease. RESULTS: The shortcomings and needs relating to communication and health care that affect this group's current and future quality of life will be identified. CONCLUSION: The study of migrant women offers a gateway allowing vulnerability in health care to be detected. An awareness of their needs will allow prototype tools to be developed to facilitate communication and care for general and acute health needs between the scientific community and the vulnerable population.

Big data driven COVID-19 pandemic crisis management: potential approach for global health.

INTRODUCTION: Information has the power to protect against unexpected events and control any crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Since COVID-19 has already rapidly spread all over the world, only technology-driven data management can provide accurate information to manage the crisis. This study aims to explore the potential of big data technologies for controlling COVID-19 transmission and managing it effectively. METHODS: A systematic review guided by PRISMA guidelines has been performed to obtain the key elements. RESULTS: This study identified the thirty-two most relevant documents for qualitative analysis. This study also reveals 10 possible sources and 8 key applications of big data for analyzing the virus infection trend, transmission pattern, virus association, and differences of genetic modifications. It also explores several limitations of big data usage including unethical use, privacy, and exploitative use of data. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the study will provide new insight and help policymakers and administrators to develop data-driven initiatives to tackle and manage the COVID-19 crisis.

Voluntary Cyclical Distancing: A Potential Alternative to Constant Level Mandatory Social Distancing, Relying on an "Infection Weather Report".

COVID-19 has significantly changed our daily lives. Stay-at-home orders and forced closings of all non-essential businesses had a significant impact on our economy. While it is important to ensure that the healthcare system is not overwhelmed, there are many questions that remain about the efficacy of extreme social distancing, and whether there are alternatives to mandatory lockdowns. This paper analyzes the utility of various levels of social distancing, and suggests an alternative approach using voluntary distancing informed by an infectious load index or "infection weather report."

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic: Approaches for the elderly and those with Alzheimer's disease.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease that since its outbreak in December 2019 has become a global pandemic. COVID-19 is caused by the previously unknown coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The elderly are the most vulnerable to COVID-19, and have the highest mortality of the afflicted. Similar patterns have been observed in epidemics and pandemics throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. In this article, we review some unique challenges the elderly and people with Alzheimer's disease face during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest approaches that could be taken from healthcare and social approaches to better handle this pandemic.