ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the educational system all over the world. As a result, the educational institutions have to solely rely on online method of delivering education in the form of e-lectures, e-presentations and webinars. Elearning has been defined as "an educational method that facilitates learning by the application of information technology and communication providing an opportunity for learners to have access to all the required education programmes."1 The term e-learning has been interchangeably used with the terms web-based learning, online learning or education, computer-assisted or -aided instruction, computer-based instruction, internet based learning, multimedia learning, technology-enhanced learning and virtual learning.2,3 All the institutions are striving to best deliver the content online to engage students effectively and to conduct timely assessments for them. It has led to accelerated development of online learning environment so that learning would not be hindered. Online Learning Management Systems (LMS) are web-based software for distributing, tracking, and managing courses over the Internet. These systems offer an effective solution to deliver the learning content effectively and establish a two-way communication between the faculty and students.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a major flaw in the current medical oxygen supply chain and inventory management system. This shortcoming caused the deaths of several patients which could have been avoided by accurate prediction of the oxygen demand and the distribution of oxygen cylinders. To avoid such calamities in the future, this paper proposes an Internet of Everything (IoE) based solution which forecasts the demand for oxygen with 80-85% accuracy. The predicted variable of expected patients enables the system to calculate the requirement of oxygen up to the next 30 days from the initiation of data collection. The system is scalable and if implemented on a city or district level, will help in the fair distribution of medical oxygen resources and will save human lives during extreme load on the supply chain. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Surveillance camera has become an essential, ubiquitous technology in people's daily lives, whether applicable for home surveillance or extended to public workplace detection. The importance of the camera is irreplaceable in terms of the agent for an enclosed system to function correctly. The goal of ubiquitous computing is to keep different devices or technology communicating seamlessly, allowing them to expand to other areas instead of limiting it to one device. However, many research papers have been released on how the camera can aid in the current situation where COVID-19 is still raging worldwide, especially in crowded places. This paper aims to suggest a method by which surveillance cameras on the university campus can automatically detect student face mask status and notify them. Alongside that, this concept of applying a video management system within the university campus will assist in the automation of invigilating the student's daily mask status from the number of embedded surveillance cameras around the campus. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have introduced working from home to avoid the risk of infection. In this study, we conducted questionnaire surveys and analysed the building energy management system (BEMS) in an office building where the number of employees working from home increased after the onset of the pandemic. The influence of working from home on the indoor environment satisfaction and the variability in energy consumption at home and office was determined. The indoor environment satisfaction was significantly higher when working from home than when working at the office. In 2020, the total energy consumption at home and office decreased by 30% in April and increased by 22% in August compared to the previous year. To work from home while saving energy regardless of the season, it is necessary to reduce office energy consumption by decreasing the number of workers present at the office. © 2022 17th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, INDOOR AIR 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a new method to quantify the potential user time savings if the urban bus is given preferential treatment, changing from mixed traffic to an exclusive bus lane, using a big data approach. The main advantage of the proposal is the use of the high amount of information that is automatically collected by sensors and management systems in many different situations with a high degree of spatial and temporal detail. These data allow ready adjustment of calculations to the specific reality measured in each case. In this way, we propose a novel methodology of general application to estimate the potential passenger savings instead of using simulation or analytical methods already present in the literature. For that purpose, in the first place, a travel time prediction model per vehicle trip has been developed. It has been calibrated and validated with a historical series of observations in real-world situations. This model is based on multiple linear regression. The estimated bus delay is obtained by comparing the estimated bus travel time with the bus travel time under free-flow conditions. Finally, estimated bus passenger time savings would be obtained if an exclusive bus lane had been implemented. An estimation of the passenger's route in each vehicle trip is considered to avoid average value simplifications in this calculation. A case study is conducted in A Coruña, Spain, to prove the methodology's applicability. The results showed that 18.7% of the analyzed bus trips underwent a delay exceeding 3 min in a 2,448 m long corridor, and more than 33,000 h per year could have been saved with an exclusive bus lane. Understanding the impact of different factors on transit and the benefits of a priority bus system on passengers can help city councils and transit agencies to know which investments to prioritize given their limited budget.
ABSTRACT
After more than two years of the beginning of Covid-19 crisis, this research work investigates the students' acceptance towards utilizing learning management systems (LMSs) as a useful supporting learning medium while most of higher education institutions over the world have adopted these systems to become an indispensable, promising teaching tool and considering the distance learning as compliance to the conditions of social isolation is case of any crisis. This article analyzes the most significant factors effecting the adoption and led to the acceptance of LMSs through the higher education across 423 undergraduate and postgraduate students from several universities in Jordan. By applying the structural equation modelling, the results reveal that all proposed determinants have an impact on the adoption of distance learning, with noted significant impact for social isolation. The infection anxiety and students' level have moderated these effects on the behavioral intentions and actual use of learning management systems and show significant impact on them.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 pandemics lead to further shortages of beds globally. Ningbo No.1 Hospital implemented an integrated digital management system to tackle inefficiency in the discharge process, however, this problem is not fully solved. To help the hospital fully address this problem, this article identifies the problems in the hospital's dataset and proposes a methodology for the machine learning model training in order to predict the patient's leaving time, which provides a space for the hospital to improve the discharge process when procedures simplify, integration and digitalization are done. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a serious global health challenge to humanity in recent times. It has caused fundamental disruptions to the global transportation system, supply chains, and trade. The impact on the transport sector resulting from lockdowns has led to huge losses in revenue. At the moment there are limited studies of the road transport sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper fills this gap using Nigeria as a case study area. A mixed method involving both qualitative and quantitative research was employed. Principal Component Analysis and Multiple Criteria Analysis were used to analyze the data. The results suggest that road transport operators strongly (90.7%) believe that 51 adopted new technologies/innovations, processes, and procedures will keep them and passengers safe from the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria. A breakdown shows that observing the lockdown directive is perceived by road transport operators as the most effective response to the pandemic. The breakdown continues in descending order thus: COVID-19 safety protocols, environmental sanitation, and promotion of hygiene, information technology, facemask, and social distancing. Others are public enlightenment, palliative, inclusion, and mass media. This indicates that non-pharmaceutical measures are very effective in the fight against the pandemic. This finding leverages support for the application of non-pharmaceutical guidelines in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.
ABSTRACT
The year 2020 has marked the spread of a global pandemic, COVID-19, challenging many aspects of our daily lives. Different organizations have been involved in controlling this outbreak. The social distancing intervention is deemed to be the most effective policy in reducing face-to-face contact and slowing down the rate of infections. Stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders have been implemented in different states and cities, affecting daily traffic patterns. Social distancing interventions and fear of the disease resulted in a traffic decline in cities and counties. However, after stay-at-home orders ended and some public places reopened, traffic gradually started to revert to pre-pandemic levels. It can be shown that counties have diverse patterns in the decline and recovery phases. This study analyzes county-level mobility change after the pandemic, explores the contributing factors, and identifies possible spatial heterogeneity. To this end, 95 counties in Tennessee have been selected as the study area to perform geographically weighted regressions (GWR) models. The results show that density on non-freeway roads, median household income, percent of unemployment, population density, percent of people over age 65, percent of people under age 18, percent of work from home, and mean time to work are significantly correlated with vehicle miles traveled change magnitude in both decline and recovery phases. Also, the GWR estimation captures the spatial heterogeneity and local variation in coefficients among counties. Finally, the results imply that the recovery phase could be estimated depending on the identified spatial attributes. The proposed model can help agencies and researchers estimate and manage decline and recovery based on spatial factors in similar events in the future.
ABSTRACT
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a nearly world-wide shelter-in-place strategy. This raises several natural concerns about the safe relaxing of current restrictions. This article focuses on the design and operation of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in the context of transportation. Do HVAC systems have a role in limiting viral spread? During shelter-in-place, can the HVAC system in a dwelling or a vehicle help limit spread of the virus? After the shelter-in-place strategy ends, can typical workplace and transportation HVAC systems limit spread of the virus? This article directly addresses these and other questions. In addition, it also summarizes simplifying assumptions needed to make meaningful predictions. This article derives new results using transform methods first given in Ginsberg and Bui. These new results describe viral spread through an HVAC system and estimate the aggregate dose of virus inhaled by an uninfected building or vehicle occupant when an infected occupant is present within the same building or vehicle. Central to these results is the derivation of a quantity called the "protection factor"-a term-of-art borrowed from the design of gas masks. Older results that rely on numerical approximations to these differential equations have long been lab validated. This article gives the exact solutions in fixed infrastructure for the first time. These solutions, therefore, retain the same lab validation of the older methods of approximation. Further, these exact solutions yield valuable insights into HVAC systems used in transportation.