Developing Causality and Severity Assessment Frameworks for Food Safety Signals Using Social Media Reviews: A Technical Report Based on Data From an Urban Indian Suburb.

Social media reviews are a valuable data source, reflecting consumer experiences and interactions with businesses. This study leverages such data to develop a passive surveillance framework for food safety in urban India. By employing a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-powered Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis tool, branded as Eat At Right Place (ERP), the study analyses over 100,000 reviews from 93 restaurants to identify and assess food safety signals. The Causality Assessment Index (CAI) and Severity Assessment Score (SAS) are introduced to systematically evaluate potential risks. The CAI uses pattern recognition and temporal relationships to establish causality while the SAS quantifies severity based on sub-aspects such as cleanliness, food handling, and unintended health outcomes. Results indicate that 40% of the restaurants had a CAI above 1, highlighting significant food safety concerns. The framework successfully prioritizes corrective actions by grading the severity of issues, demonstrating its potential for real-time food safety management. This study underscores the importance of integrating innovative data-driven approaches into public health monitoring systems and suggests future improvements in natural language processing algorithms and data source expansion. The findings pave the way for enhanced food safety surveillance and timely regulatory interventions.

A Situational Analysis of the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Digital Health Research Initiatives in South Asia.

The objective of this paper was to evaluate and compare the quantity and sustainability of digital health initiatives in the South Asia region before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used a two-step methodology of (a) descriptive analysis of digital health research articles published from 2016 to 2021 from South Asia in terms of stratification of research articles based on diseases and conditions they were developed, geography, and tasks wherein the initiative was applied and (b) a simple and replicable tool developed by authors to assess the sustainability of digital health initiatives using experimental or observational study designs. The results of the descriptive analysis highlight the following: (a) there was a 40% increase in the number of studies reported in 2020 when compared to 2019; (b) the three most common areas wherein substantive digital health research has been focused are health systems strengthening, ophthalmic disorders, and COVID-19; and (c) remote consultation, health information delivery, and clinical decision support systems are the top three commonly developed tools. We developed and estimated the inter-rater operability of the sustainability assessment tool ascertained with a Kappa value of 0.806 (±0.088). We conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a positive impact on digital health research with an improvement in the number of digital health initiatives and an improvement in the sustainability score of studies published during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Literature Review on Perceptions and Practices Related to Healthcare and Nutrition Amongst the Residents of Urban Slums Across India.

Urban regions are home to more than a billion people worldwide; by 2030, more than half of the world's population is projected to reside there. Many rural residents relocate to urban regions in pursuit of employment, better living conditions, and access to healthcare facilities. The study's primary objective is to collate the findings related to perceptions, knowledge, attitude, and practices from studies across the urban slums in India related to healthcare and nutrition. A systematic search of articles was conducted on the National Library of Medicine PubMed Portal Google Scholar, and J-Stor databases for published studies across the indexed journals. Academic social media sites like Academia.edu and Researchgate.org were also searched for grey literature. The inclusion criteria include studies conducted in Urban slums from 2010 to 2022, conducted amongst the Indian population within the Indian Geography, and focusing on documenting perceptions, knowledge, attitude, and practices. Exclusion criteria were cross-sectional surveys with quantitative questionnaires focusing on the prevalence of diseases and the burden of risk factors, literature reviews, systematic reviews, frameworks for implementation of specific interventions, and experimental study designs. A total of 18 qualitative observational studies were included in the review and the findings related to knowledge, attitudes, and practices identified from the literature were summarized. The literature indicated adequate knowledge about nutrition and healthcare, and the barriers towards transitioning knowledge to practice were related to lack of resources, priorities around employment and income, and the attitudes towards change-making were usually based on convenience to access cost of service and availability of the services. The review recommends further investment in research to understand the perceptions, patterns of nutrition, and health-seeking behaviours. Also, there is a pressing need to use the evidence for developing policies in line with the expectations of poor urban communities.

Provision of rehabilitation and assistive technology services in a low resource setting during the COVID-19 pandemic and introduction of telehealth: service users' and providers' perspectives.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a challenge for providing assistive technology (AT) and rehabilitation services, with many service providers implementing telehealth service provision for the first time. The objective of this study was to explore the experiences of people accessing and providing AT and rehabilitation services during the pandemic and to assess the implementation of telehealth service delivery at an assistive technology and rehabilitation center in India. A mixed-methods design, combining analysis of clinical data and semi-structured interviews, was utilized. A descriptive analysis of demographics and clinical characteristics of service users accessing services through telehealth, or in-person mode was completed. In addition, service users were interviewed to explore their experiences of accessing services during the pandemic. Service providers were also interviewed to gather their opinions on telehealth service delivery during the pandemic. Findings showed that telehealth was an alternative tool in the pandemic for continuing to deliver services in a low-resource setting. However, not all types of services could be successfully delivered via telehealth. There are barriers to the delivery of telehealth services that need to be considered and addressed to allow successful implementation, and it is important to consider that telehealth consultations are not suitable for all service users.