scholarly journals Distance Special Education Delivery by Social Robots

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1034 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Lytridis ◽  
Christos Bazinas ◽  
George Sidiropoulos ◽  
George A. Papakostas ◽  
Vassilis G. Kaburlasos ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Experimental Protocol ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
The World ◽  
Emergency Actions ◽  
Education Delivery ◽  
Almost All

The outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) has resulted in a significant disruption of almost all aspects of everyday life. Several governments around the world have adopted emergency actions to reduce spreading of the virus, which included suspension of non-essential activities and the implementation of social distancing practices. In our case, governmental measures have resulted in the suspension of our experimental protocol for testing the effectiveness of robot-based treatment of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) compared to conventional human (therapist)-based treatment. These circumstances led to an investigation of the potential of tele-consulting. This paper describes alternatives to implement synchronous and asynchronous therapeutic sessions for children already participating in the protocol, in order to reduce the negative effects of the strict cessation of the in-person sessions. The usefulness of our approach was assessed by recording the children’s and the parent’s satisfaction via questionnaires. In addition, we compare satisfaction between the synchronous and asynchronous sessions. The results show that the approach has been very satisfactory and useful for both children and parents, and that this was especially the case for the robot-based material.

scholarly journals COVID-19 pandemic: A review of the global lockdown and its far-reaching effects

2021 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 003685042110198
Author(s):  
Helen Onyeaka ◽  
Christian K Anumudu ◽  
Zainab T Al-Sharify ◽  
Esther Egele-Godswill ◽  
Paul Mbaegbu
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
World Health ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The World ◽  
Education Delivery ◽  
Environmental Air ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Impact

COVID-19, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the 11th of March 2020, leading to some form of lockdown across almost all countries of the world. The extent of the global pandemic due to COVID-19 has a significant impact on our lives that must be studied carefully to combat it. This study highlights the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on crucial aspects of daily life globally, including; Food security, Global economy, Education, Tourism, hospitality, sports and leisure, Gender Relation, Domestic Violence/Abuse, Mental Health and Environmental air pollution through a systematic search of the literature. The COVID-19 global lockdown was initiated to stem the spread of the virus and ‘flatten the curve’ of the pandemic. However, the impact of the lockdown has had far-reaching effects in different strata of life, including; changes in the accessibility and structure of education delivery to students, food insecurity as a result of unavailability and fluctuation in prices, the depression of the global economy, increase in mental health challenges, wellbeing and quality of life amongst others. This review article highlights the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown across the globe. As the global lockdown is being lifted in a phased manner in various countries of the world, it is necessary to explore its impacts to understand its consequences comprehensively. This will guide future decisions that will be made in a possible future wave of the COVID-19 pandemic or other global disease outbreak.

scholarly journals Multisite Autism Spectrum Disorder Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network Classifier and Individual Morphological Brain Networks

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjing Gao ◽  
Mingren Chen ◽  
Yuanyuan Li ◽  
Yachun Gao ◽  
Yanling Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Convolutional Neural Network ◽  
Structural Mri ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Structural Covariance ◽  
Almost All ◽  
New Framework

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a range of neurodevelopmental disorders with behavioral and cognitive impairment and brings huge burdens to the patients’ families and the society. To accurately identify patients with ASD from typical controls is important for early detection and early intervention. However, almost all the current existing classification methods for ASD based on structural MRI (sMRI) mainly utilize the independent local morphological features and do not consider the covariance patterns of these features between regions. In this study, by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) and individual structural covariance network, we proposed a new framework to classify ASD patients with sMRI data from the ABIDE consortium. Moreover, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) was applied to characterize the weight of features contributing to the classification. The experimental results showed that our proposed method outperforms the currently used methods for classifying ASD patients with the ABIDE data and achieves a high classification accuracy of 71.8% across different sites. Furthermore, the discriminative features were found to be mainly located in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, which may be the early biomarkers for the diagnosis of ASD. Our study demonstrated that CNN is an effective tool to build the framework for the diagnosis of ASD with individual structural covariance brain network.

Coronavirus and Fingerprint Technology

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Gabriel B. Iwasokun
Keyword(s):  
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ◽  
Viral Infection ◽  
Virus Disease ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Corona Virus ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All

The corona virus disease, otherwise known as COVID-19, is an extremely communicable and pathogenic viral infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has spread to almost all the countries in the world. The transmission of the virus is through touching of the nose, eyes, or mouth by a finger that has been contaminated through droplets on a surface when a carrier sneezes or coughs. Since the existing fingerprint devices are predominantly contact based, it implies that they can aid in the transmission of the virus. This paper discusses the application of fingerprint devices in notable places with high rate of COVID-19 infection as well as the threats to fingerprint technologies and the countermeasures. The need to change focus and orientation towards contactless biometric technologies as sure solution to the fear and animosity expressed towards contact-based fingerprint technology is also expatiated.

Talentos e Aptidões: Um olhar sobre o Autismo

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Lin
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Neurodevelopmental Disorders ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Educational Environment ◽  
Clinical Heterogeneity ◽  
Economic Costs ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Term ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
The Media

Autism is a medical term that encompasses a broad spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by impaired reciprocal socialization and communication, often accompanied by restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Due to the enlargement in the clinical diagnostic boundaries and the increased awareness of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the world has seen a dramatic increase in its prevalence during the last two decades. ASD is currently considered one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders worldwide. Frequently reported in terms of comorbidities, disabilities, burden and economic costs, the talents, gifts and abilities of people within the autistic spectrum only reaches the media when it amazes the audience. In this review, we want show that the high clinical heterogeneity found in autism can also be applied to the gifts and abilities, and that it must be nurtured with appropriate developmental, educational environment and above all, support and hope.

Virtual Reality (VR) for School Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Guazzaroni ◽  
Anitha S. Pillai
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
School Children ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The World ◽  
Training And Support

Various medical and technological organizations are working on the development of unconventional solutions such as therapy and assistance for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Different organizations, researchers and educators have been involved in the study and realization of virtual reality (VR) solutions to be used as therapy, training, and support for these individuals. Previous researches and experiments showed that it is possible to ameliorate the level of concentration, coordination, socialization, communication, self-awareness, and memory in school children treated with these tools. VR environments may offer a total physical involvement of the ASDs that may see the world through virtual immersion and active practice. This chapter presents a way of rethinking teaching and learning.

scholarly journals Fiscal, Investment and Export Multipliers and the COVID-19 Pandemic Slowdowns Uncertainty Factor in the First Half of 2020

Risks ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz J. Derkacz
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Gross Domestic Product ◽  
Domestic Product ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Uncertainty Factor ◽  
The World ◽  
European Union Countries ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Fiscal Investment

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant slowdown in the development of almost all economies in the world. In this context, the main goal of this research is to try to present changes in the value of fiscal, investment and export multipliers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was conducted in selected European Union countries. They are France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain. This research is based on the theory of effective demand. The values of feeds and leakages of total demand in the period from 2015 to 2020 were examined and calculated. On this basis, the individual multipliers of autonomous spending were analyzed and their changes in the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic were presented. The analyses led to a surprising conclusion: it found that the autonomous spending multipliers in some economies increased. This means that they have become ‘security buffers’ for the health of economies. This means that the increase in their value weakened the negative effects of changes in autonomous expenditure on gross domestic product.

scholarly journals Is hydroxychloroquine beneficial for COVID-19 patients?

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xing Li ◽  
Ying Wang ◽  
Patrizia Agostinis ◽  
Arnold Rabson ◽  
Gerry Melino ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ◽  
Emergency Care ◽  
Public Health Emergency ◽  
World Health ◽  
Beneficial Effects ◽  
The World ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Effective Drugs

Abstract The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first reported in December 2019. As similar cases rapidly emerged around the world1–3, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020 and pronounced the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 20204. The virus has reached almost all countries of the globe. As of June 3, 2020, the accumulated confirmed cases reached 6,479,405 with more than 383,013 deaths worldwide. The urgent and emergency care of COVID-19 patients calls for effective drugs, in addition to the beneficial effects of remdesivir5, to control the disease and halt the pandemic.

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