Corona Health -- A Study- and Sensor-based Mobile App Platform Exploring Aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Felix Beierle, Johannes Schobel, Carsten Vogel, Johannes Allgaier, Lena Mulansky, Fabian Haug, Julian Haug, Winfried Schlee, Marc Holfelder, Michael Stach, Marc… 展开作者
Felix Beierle, Johannes Schobel, Carsten Vogel, Johannes Allgaier, Lena Mulansky, Fabian Haug, Julian Haug, Winfried Schlee, Marc Holfelder, Michael Stach, Marc Schickler, Harald Baumeister, Caroline Cohrdes, Jürgen Deckert, Lorenz Deserno, Johanna-Sophie Edler, Felizitas A. Eichner, Helmut Greger, Grit Hein, Peter Heuschmann, Dennis John, Hans A. Kestler, Dagmar Krefting, Berthold Langguth, Patrick Meybohm, Thomas Probst, Manfred Reichert, Marcel Romanos, Stefan Störk, Yannik Terhorst, Martin Weiß, Rüdiger Pryss
Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing such an app is not trivial, necessitates strict regulatory and legal requirements, and requires short development cycles to appropriately react to abrupt changes in the pandemic. Based on an existing app framework, we developed Corona Health, an app that serves as a platform for deploying questionnaire-based studies in combination with recordings of mobile sensors. In this paper, we present the technical details of Corona Health and provide first insights into the collected data. Through collaborative efforts from experts from public health, medicine, psychology, and computer science, we released Corona Health publicly on Google Play and the Apple App Store (in July, 2020) in 8 languages and attracted 7,290 installations so far. Currently, five studies related to physical and mental well-being are deployed and 17,241 questionnaires have been filled out. Corona Health proves to be a viable tool for conducting research related to the COVID-19 pandemic and can serve as a blueprint for future EMA-based studies. The data we collected will substantially improve our knowledge on mental and physical health states, traits and trajectories as well as its risk and protective factors over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and its diverse prevention measures.
This study examined the impact of social media in the fight against the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Anambra state, Nigeria. The key objectives are to: find out if the numbers of social media users increased in Anambra state since the wake of coronavirus pandemic; find out if the social media is being utilised in the fight against the spread of coronavirus pandemic in Anambra state; find out how the social media is being utilised in the fight against the spread of coronavirus pandemic in Anambra state; and discover the impact of social media in the fight against the spread of c…
The very first infected novel coronavirus case (COVID-19) was found in Hubei, China in Dec. 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has spread over 214 countries and areas in the world, and has significantly affected every aspect of our daily lives. At the time of writing this article, the numbers of infected cases and deaths still increase significantly and have no sign of a well-controlled situation, e.g., as of 13 July 2020, from a total number of around 13.1 million positive cases, 571, 527 deaths were reported in the world. Motivated by recent advances and applications of artificial intelligence (AI)…
With the emergence of a new pandemic worldwide, a novel strategy to approach it has emerged. Several initiatives under the umbrella of "open science" are contributing to tackle this unprecedented situation. In particular, the "R Language and Environment for Statistical Computing" offers an excellent tool and ecosystem for approaches focusing on open science and reproducible results. Hence it is not surprising that with the onset of the pandemic, a large number of R packages and resources were made available for researches working in the pandemic. In this paper, we present an R package that all…
The 2019 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by a quick dissemination of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has had a deep impact worldwide, both in terms of the loss of human life and the economic and social disruption. The use of digital technologies has been seen as an important effort to combat the pandemic and one of such technologies is contact tracing applications. These applications were successfully employed to face other infectious diseases, thus they have been used during the current pandemic. However, the use of contact tracing poses sever…
The new coronavirus became a severe health issue for the world. This situation has motivated studies of different areas to combat this pandemic. In software engineering, we point out data visualization projects to follow the disease evolution, machine learning to estimate the pandemic behavior, and computer vision processing radiologic images. Most of these projects are stored in version control systems, and there are discussions about them in Question & Answer websites. In this work, we conducted a Mining Software Repository on a large number of questions and projects aiming to find trends th…
Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government's pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes. Using a q…
As the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting life worldwide, related online communities are popping up. In particular, two "new" communities, /r/China flu and /r/Coronavirus, emerged on Reddit and have been dedicated to COVID- related discussions from the very beginning of this pandemic. With /r/Coronavirus promoted as the official community on Reddit, it remains an open question how users choose between these two highly-related communities. In this paper, we characterize user trajectories in these two communities from the beginning of COVID-19 to the end of September 2020. We show that new users of…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
The objective of the study is to examine coronavirus disease (COVID-19) related discussions, concerns, and sentiments that emerged from tweets posted by Twitter users. We analyze 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 25 hashtags such as "coronavirus," "COVID-19," "quarantine" from March 1 to April 21 in 2020. We use a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigram, bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected Tweets. Popular unigrams include "virus," "lockdown," and "quarantine." Popular big…
Older adults are at greater risk of experiencing negative physical and psychological impacts of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Our ongoing study is assessing COVID-19 information exposure in adults aged 55 and above compared to other age groups living in Massachusetts and Georgia. This work investigates the potential association between information exposure and wellbeing as well as adherence to COVID-19 protective measures. Our initial results show that older adults received information related to COVID-19 less frequently than the middle-aged group, yet they feel more content …
While COVID-19 has impacted humans for a long time, people search the web for pandemic-related information, causing anxiety. From a theoretic perspective, previous studies have confirmed that the number of COVID-19 cases can cause negative emotions, but how statistics of different dimensions, such as the number of imported cases, the number of local cases, and the number of government-designated lockdown zones, stimulate people's emotions requires detailed understanding. In order to obtain the views of people on COVID-19, this paper first proposes a deep learning model which classifies texts r…
Coronavirus, which emerged in China towards the end of 2019 and subsequently influenced the whole world, has changed the daily lives of people to a great extent. In many parts of the world, in both cities and rural areas, people have been forced to stay home weeks. They have only been allowed to leave home for fundamental needs such as food and health needs, and most started to work from home. In this period, very few people, including essential workers, had to leave their homes. Avoiding social contact is proven to be the best method to reduce the spread of the novel Coronavirus. Because of t…
Human civilization is experiencing a critical situation that presents itself for a new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This virus emerged in late December 2019 in Wuhan city, Hubei, China. The grim fact of COVID-19 is, it is highly contagious in nature, therefore, spreads rapidly all over the world and causes severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Responding to the severity of COVID-19 research community directs the attention to the analysis of COVID-19, to diminish its antagonistic impact towards society. Numerous studies claim that the subcontinent, i.e., Banglade…
COVID-19 pandemic has adversely and disproportionately impacted people suffering from mental health issues and substance use problems. This has been exacerbated by social isolation during the pandemic and the social stigma associated with mental health and substance use disorders, making people reluctant to share their struggles and seek help. Due to the anonymity and privacy they provide, social media emerged as a convenient medium for people to share their experiences about their day to day struggles. Reddit is a well-recognized social media platform that provides focused and structured foru…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The study aims to understand Twitter users' discourse and psychological reactions to COVID-19. We use machine learning techniques to analyze about 1.9 million Tweets (written in English) related to coronavirus collected from January 23 to March 7, 2020. A total of salient 11 topics are identified and then categorized into ten themes, including "updates about confirmed cases," "COVID-19 related death," "cases outside China (worldwide)," "COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea," "early signs of the outbreak in New York," "Diamond Princess cruise," "economic impact," "Preventive measures," "authorities…
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that is rapidly spreading across the globe. The clinical spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia ranges from mild to critically ill cases and requires early detection and monitoring, within a clinical environment for critical cases and remotely for mild cases. The fear of contamination in clinical environments has led to a dramatic reduction in on-site referrals for routine care. There has also been a perceived need to continuously monitor non-severe COVID- 19 patients, either from their quara…
In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn convincing research ground as a new research topic in a wide variety of academic and industrial disciplines, especially in healthcare. The IoT revolution is reshaping modern healthcare systems by incorporating technological, economic, and social prospects. It is evolving healthcare systems from conventional to more personalized healthcare systems through which patients can be diagnosed, treated, and monitored more easily. The current global challenge of the pandemic caused by the novel severe contagious respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Instituto de Salud Carlos III（卡洛斯三世卫生研究所）；Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol（Germans Trias i Pujol大学医院）；Universidad de Guadalajara（瓜达拉哈拉大学）；Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud（健康科学中心大学学院）；OPD Hospital Civil de Guadalajara（瓜达拉哈拉市立医院）
Just like your phone can detect what song is playing in crowded spaces, we show that Artificial Intelligence transfer learning algorithms trained on cough phone recordings results in diagnostic tests for COVID-19. To gain adoption by the health care community, we plan to validate our results in a clinical trial and three other venues in Mexico, Spain and the USA . However, if we had data from other on-going clinical trials and volunteers, we may do much more. For example, for confirmed stay-at-home COVID-19 patients, a longitudinal audio test could be developed to determine contact-with-hospit…
We examine the implementation of social robots in real-world settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we analyze the areas in which social robots are being adopted, the roles and tasks being fulfilled, and the robot models being implemented. For this, we traced back and analyzed 240 deployment cases with 86 different social robots worldwide that have been adopted since the coronavirus outbreak. We found that social robot adoption during this period was strongly related to the use of this technology for crisis management. The social robots' capacity to perform the roles of liaison …
Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Kumoh National Institute of Technology（韩国国立金乌工科大学）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH)（胡志明市工业大学）；Pusan National University（釜山大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied widely in our daily lives in a variety of ways with numerous success stories. AI has also contributed to dealing with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which has been happening around the globe. This paper presents a survey of AI methods being used in various applications in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak and outlines the crucial role of AI research in this unprecedented battle. We touch on areas where AI plays as an essential component, from medical image processing, data analytics, text mining and natural language processing, …
COVID-19 has caused widespread damage across many areas of life and has made humans more dependent on the internet and technology making us realize the importance of secure remote working environments. While social separation is encouraged during moments of lockdown, online infrastructure has become the central focus for communication, commerce, working, and learning, creating a new challenge and trend for companies to adopt new methods and operating models. The cases of cyber-attacks increased, and fraudsters and cybercriminals took use of this to intensify their illegal activities by taking …
The objective of this article is to explore the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) interventions and its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the containment of the pandemic spread of novel Coronavirus. The research adopted a qualitative research approach, while the study data were collected through online content review and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Starting with a preliminary set of about 1200 electronic resources or contents, 56 were selected for review study, applying an inclusion and exclusion criteria. The review study revealed ICT interventions that inclu…
Given multiple new COVID-19 variants are continuously emerging, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still primary control strategies to curb the further spread of coronavirus. However, implementing strict interventions over extended periods of time is inevitably hurting the economy. With an aim to solve this multi-objective decision-making problem, we investigate the underlying associations between policies, mobility patterns, and virus transmission. We further evaluate the relative performance of existing COVID-19 control measures and explore potential optimal strategies that can strike the …
The world is suffering from a pandemic called COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. National governments have problems evaluating the reach of the epidemic, due to having limited resources and tests at their disposal. This problem is especially acute in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Hence, any simple, cheap and flexible means of evaluating the incidence and evolution of the epidemic in a given country with a reasonable level of accuracy is useful. In this paper, we propose a technique based on (anonymous) surveys in which participants report on the health status of their contact…
The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic is affecting every facet of human lives (e.g., public health, education, economy, transportation, and the environment). This novel pandemic and citywide implemented lockdown measures are affecting virus transmission, people's travel patterns, and air quality. Many studies have been conducted to predict the COVID-19 diffusion, assess the impacts of the pandemic on human mobility and air quality, and assess the impacts of lockdown measures on viral spread with a range of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This review study aims to analyze results from past res…
Nowadays, the coronavirus pandemic has and is still causing large numbers of deaths and infected people. Although governments all over the world have taken severe measurements to slow down the virus spreading (e.g., travel restrictions, suspending all sportive, social, and economic activities, quarantines, social distancing, etc.), a lot of persons have died and a lot more are still in danger. Indeed, a recently conducted study~\cite{ref2} has reported that 79\% of the confirmed infections in China were caused by undocumented patients who had no symptoms. In the same context, in numerous other…
The world is under an ongoing pandemic, COVID-19, of a scale last seen a century ago. Contact tracing is one of the most critical and highly effective tools for containing and breaking the chain of infections especially in the case of infectious respiratory diseases like COVID-19. Thanks to the technological progress in our times, we now have digital mobile applications like the Corona-Warn-App for digital contact tracing. However, due to the invasive nature of contact tracing, it is very important to preserve the privacy of the users. Privacy preservation is important for increasing trust in …
Within the healthcare environment, mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) are more and more important. The number of new mHealth apps has risen steadily in the last years. Especially the Covid-19 pandemic has led to an enormous amount of app releases. Notably, in most countries, mHealth applications have to be already compliant with several regulatory aspects in order to be declared to be a 'medical app'. However, the latest applicable medical device regulation (MDR) does not comment in more detail on the topic of the requirements for mHealth applications. When developing a medical app, i…
There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing attackers to victimise social media users with a range of threats. This paper performs a large-scale study to investigate the impact of a pandemic and the lockdown periods on the security and privacy of social media users. We analyse 10.6 Million COVID-related tweets from 533 days of data crawling and investigate users' security and privacy behaviour in three different periods (i.e., before, during, and after the lo…
Context. As a novel coronavirus swept the world in early 2020, thousands of software developers began working from home. Many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions. Objective. This study investigates the effects of the pandemic on developers' wellbeing and productivity. Method. A questionnaire survey was created mainly from existing, validated scales and translated into 12 languages. The data was analyzed using non-parametric inferential statistics and structural equation modeling. Results. The questionnaire received 2225 usable responses from 53 countries. Factor an…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused enormous disruptions to not only the United States, but also the global economy. Due to the pandemic, issues in the supply chain and concerns about food shortage drove up the food prices. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices for food increased 4.1% and 3.7% over the year ended in August 2020 and August 2021, respectively, while the amount of annual increase in the food prices prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is less than 2.0%. Previous studies show that such kinds of exogenous disasters, including the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, 9…
The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has severely impacted almost all countries around the world. It not only has caused a tremendous burden on health-care providers to bear, but it has also brought severe impacts on the economy and social life. The presence of reliable data and the results of in-depth statistical analyses provide researchers and policymakers with invaluable information to understand this pandemic and its growth pattern more clearly. This paper combines and processes an extensive collection of publicly available datasets to provide a unified information source …
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Bioxydyn Limited（博克西丁有限公司）
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, emerged into a world being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) based on big data, computational power and neural networks. The gaze of these networks has in recent years turned increasingly towards applications in healthcare. It was perhaps inevitable that COVID-19, a global disease propagating health and economic devastation, should capture the attention and resources of the world's computer scientists in academia and industry. The potential for AI to support the response to the pandemic has …
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives around the world on an unprecedented scale. We intend to investigate hoarding behaviors in response to the pandemic using large-scale social media data. First, we collect hoarding-related tweets shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus. Next, we analyze the hoarding and anti-hoarding patterns of over 42,000 unique Twitter users in the United States from March 1 to April 30, 2020, and dissect the hoarding-related tweets by age, gender, and geographic location. We find the percentage of females in both hoarding and anti-hoarding groups is hi…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to have devastating effects across the globe. No nation has been free from the uncertainty brought by this pandemic. The health, social and economic tolls associated with it are causing strong emotions and spreading fear in people of all ages, genders, and races. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have expressed their feelings and opinions related to a wide range of aspects of their lives via Twitter. In this study, we consider a framework for extracting sentiment scores and opinions from COVID-19 related tweets. We connect users' se…
