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Skin diseases are among the leading causes of morbidity in conflict zones and disaster areas and are usually attributed to overcrowding, high population density in rudimentary shelters or camps, famine, inadequate safe water and sanitation, and poor vaccination status among victims. Despite the secondary role of a dermatologist in the course of an emergency, the increasing number of modern armed conflicts and natural disasters emphasizes the importance of keeping dermatologists throughout the world aware of potential risks and imminent skin damage in such circumstances. In areas with no access to dermatologic care because of distance or simple manpower, teledermatology works as an ideal solution to reach the underserved. However, many factors such as cost, lack of access to modern communication, limited human medical resources, and underdeveloped infrastructure serve as major obstacles to its widespread use.

While telemedicine has been utilized with more frequency over the past two decades, there remained significant barriers to its broad implementation. The COVID-19 global pandemic served as a stimulus for rapid expansion and implementation of telemedicine services across medical institutions worldwide in order to maximize patient care delivery, minimize exposure risk among healthcare providers and patients alike, and avoid overcrowding of patient care facilities. In this experience report, we highlight the teledermatology initiatives executed by the Dermatology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, with particular emphasis on image ingestion and potential for future automation and improvement.

Bike-sharing systems have been growing rapidly worldwide over the past decade. In times of high traffic, pollution concerns, and decrease of physical activity, bike-sharing perfectly meets the needs of the present. Crucial to the success of such systems is the proper location of stations to attract users and to have permanent availability of stations for renting and returning bicycles. Nonetheless, user demand for bicycles and bike parking racks is unbalanced during the day, which may induce overloading of some stations and depletion of others. This study investigated a bike-sharing programme in Belfast which regularly encounters the problem of overcrowding and empty stations. A rebalancing approach is introduced based on a tree based predictive model for bike and rack demand. The novelty of this methodology is its use of station location features, such as proximity to the parks or train stations for demand prediction. This study also proposes an approach to select new sites to expand the system. The approach is applied to the Belfast Bike system where two new locations are successfully proposed.

Since the early twentieth century, the intensity of malaria transmission has decreased sharply worldwide, although it is still an infectious disease with a yearly estimate of 228 million cases. The aim of this study was to expand our knowledge on the main drivers of malaria in Spain. In the case of autochthonous malaria, these drivers were linked to socioeconomic and hygienic and sanitary conditions, especially in rural areas due to their close proximity to the wetlands that provide an important habitat for anopheline reproduction. In the case of imported malaria, the main drivers were associated with urban areas, a high population density and international communication nodes (e.g. airports). Another relevant aspect is that the major epidemic episodes of the twentieth century were strongly influenced by war and military conflicts and overcrowding of the healthcare system due to the temporal overlap with the pandemic flu of 1918. Therefore, military conflicts and overlap with other epidemics or pandemics are considered to be drivers of malaria that can—in a temporary manner—exponentially intensify transmission of the disease. Climatic factors did not play a relevant role as drivers of malaria in Spain (at least directly). However, they did influence the seasonality of the disease and, during the epidemic outbreak of 1940–1944, the climate conditions favored or coadjuvated its spread. The results of this study provide additional knowledge on the seasonal and interannual variability of malaria that can help to develop and implement health risk control measures. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41207-021-00245-8.

Crowd management and monitoring are important research topics in order to ensure personal and community safety by making use of video images. The crowd tracking system (CMS) includes tasks such as density variation in images, irregular distribution of people and objects, overcrowding, exposure estimation. People come together for various purposes in areas designed for socializing, such as parks, stadiums, airports, hospitals, and shopping malls. Generally, these areas are monitored by closed-circuit TeleVision (CCTV). However, this type of system brings problems. The main ones are portability, flexible accessibility, limited coverage area, high power consumption. Crowd density is often examined by people for behavioral analysis or to identify suspicious people. Computer vision and deep learning approaches are maintained in order to prevent mistakes caused by human error and to make a faster evaluation.

Mainly in the last years the analysis of the behaviour of shoppers inside a store is becoming a very attracting issue. Thanks to the use of technologies and artificial intelligence based approaches novel methods are applied to automatically evaluate the movement of shopper in the store, the interactions with the products on the shelves, the time spent inside the store, and more, in a passive mode without interviewing the consumers and preserving their privacy. The aim of this paper is to propose a method based on a Support Vector Machine classifier that classifies the interactions of the shopper with products solving the problem of unclassifiable interactions, when carts, baskets, or other objects are temporarily placed in front of the shelves. The implemented system is also able to solve the overcrowding problem that emerges when several shoppers are close to each other, and entering the analysis area of the camera together, were detected as a single person and not as distinct persons.

Covid-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 has claimed numerous lives around the world. We developed a novel predictive model based on machine learning algorithms to predict the mortality risk of patients with COVID-19. In this study, we used documented data of 117,000 patients worldwide with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19. This study proposes a predictive model to help hospitals and medical facilities decide who has higher priority to be hospitalized and triage patients when the system is overwhelmed by overcrowding. The results demonstrate 93% overall accuracy in predicting the mortality rate. We used a number of machine learning algorithms including artificial neural networks, support vector machine (SVM), and random forest to predict the mortality rate in patients with COVID-19. In this study, the most alarming symptoms and features were also identified.

As a result of travel activities, overtourism has become a global issue. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of overtourism would benefit localized overcrowding as a new occurrence in the tourism industry. Since there is no specific measurement to evaluate tourist experiences at crowded attractions, this study aims to explore the perception and feelings of tourists when they visit popular and crowded attractions through topic modeling and sentiment analysis based on TripAdvisor online reviews as of the end of 2019. By investigating the top 10 attractions in Paris, the results present 24 topics frequently discussed by tourists. Examples of some topics related to overtourism are safety, service, queuing, and social interaction. Specifically, tourists felt the most negative towards safety and security among all the identified topics. By bridging overtourism, text analytics, and user-generated-content, this study contributes to the field of tourist experiences and crowd management.

The progressive population ageing increases the participation of autonomous Elderly to the community life and their presence in public buildings. Such complex spaces are generally characterized by high occupants’ density, with different users’ types (including elderly) that additionally own a scarce familiarity with the emergency layout. Emergency safety levels (i.e.: fire) are significantly affected by man-environment interactions, especially for the hosted autonomous Elderly. Here, they tend to choose well-known paths, while group behaviours can provoke overcrowding and, hence, an increasing of the evacuation time. Cognitive Buildings can solve this issue, because they can suggest to people how to behave in relation to the monitored surrounding conditions. This study proposes a Cognitive Wayfinding System (Co-WayS) to be applied in such scenarios, with a low impact level. Co-Ways is composed by: individuals’ badges for their wi-fi tracking; building components including wi-fi tracking system and electrically-illumined signs (to dynamically address correct paths to evacuees); central processing unit to solve a density-based guidance algorithm for sign activation. Co-WaysS addresses the egress paths depending on monitored queueing conditions. A first validation in a significant public building is performed through egress drills. When using Co-WayS, the evacuation time decreases (−28%) while correct path choices (+17%) and individuals’ sign confidence (+58%) increases, with respect to standard signage.

The aim of this research is to develop a work - based conditions framework for estimating the optimal Construction labour Productivity for labour-intensive works in the Ghanaian construction industry. The objectives of the study are to identify the factors influencing work based condition on labour productivity in Ghanaian construction firms; to determine the level of labour productivity on labour - intensive works in Ghanaian construction firms and to the examine the extent to which the construction labour productivity framework fits into the identified factors the Ghanaian construction firms. Stratified sampling technique was used, based on the diverse nature of the population. Records available at the Ghana Social Opportunity Project (GSOP) indicated that there are 920 professionals involved in labour-intensive works and these comprised 200 Contractors; 200 Site Engineers; 200 Facilitators; 200 Time Keepers; 60 District Engineers and 60 Ghana Social Opportunity Project (GSOP) desk officers. Since not all the district offices were handling road construction projects, purposive sampling technique was used to select 40 districts that were in labour-intensive road construction projects under the GSOP programme. Of the 40 districts, 560 respondents were sampled for the study. The data obtained from the study were analysed and presented in tables and diagrams. The findings established that there were four components that contributed to work based conditions and these: Task system; Beneficiary knowledge of task; Work Expectation and Wage system. It was established that there was low productivity on sites and these were as a result of overcrowding of beneficiaries and the use of more aged in the work since the programme is a social intervention programme to support the poor in the community government encouraged many beneficiaries to be recruited for the programme hence do not follow the work study schedule to determine the required number of beneficiaries for a given task.

This chapter aims to analyze the challenges that are required in the receiving and integration of unaccompanied minors at the Brazilian borders in the face of the Venezuelan migration crisis. Between August 2018 and December 2019, according to official numbers, more than 7000 children crossed the border into Brazil alone or accompanied by people who were not their legal guardians. Despite the institutional and legislative advances in the Brazilian system involving children and adolescents in a special migratory situation, there are still countless challenges to the assurance of their basic rights. These include documentation problems, overcrowding in institutional shelters and the lack of resources to accompany minors in other stages of the integration process in Brazilian territory. These multiply vulnerabilities such as difficulties in accessing basic services, recruitment to crime and exposure to human trafficking and child sexual exploitation. The legal and policy framework for emergency assistance provided to public agencies may not be sufficient for safe and sustainable integration of these unaccompanied minors. This warns us of the need for effective protection of fundamental rights guaranteed to all, including unaccompanied Venezuelan children during and after their reception on Brazilian borders.

Homeless persons frequently find themselves interacting with the legal justice system. A clear understanding of such a complex system and the key elements that perpetuate that interaction could help formulate solutions to avoid the so-called revolving door in corrections.

The automotive industry is an important industry for Japan and has a great impact on the Japanese economy. According to the Automotive Industry Strategy 2014 announced by the Ministry of Economy, five problems will occur in the next 10 to 20 years, and countermeasures are required. Five is-sues are increasing environmental and energy constraints, population growth and personal income growth, aging, urban overcrowding and depopulation, and changing values. Moreover, it is affected by external factors which is consumption tax increase, soaring gasoline and so on.

The level of overcrowding of hospitals and health care centers in Colombia and especially in the cities far away from the main capitals has had an increase in recent years, this problem generates a constant and growing discomfort in the Colombian population due to the delayed or lack of provision of various medical services and access difficulties, especially in remote areas. With the aim of providing health centers with tools to make virtual appointments and avoid overcrowding of patients who do not need to go to hospitals due the characteristics of their illness and also to improve the implementation of technologies in the Colombian health system, we propose a framework to develop telemonitoring platforms with dynamic processing capabilities. The tests are carried out using cloud computing and free programming tools. Through the tests carried out on the proposed modeling, we determined that it can be implemented in a simple, fast and easy way.

The fast-track is an important strategy for the management and control of overcrowding, which is increasingly used in hospital emergency services. This review article aims to identify the main approaches and criteria for analyzing and deciding on the implementation of the fast-track strategy in the Emergency Department. The bibliographic review considered articles published in the Scopus and MedLine databases during the period 2010 and 2020. In general, the bibliographic research showed: the relative scarcity of scientific communication, regarding the implementation of fast-track strategies in hospital management systems; the diversity of the implantation purposes; the preference for modelling and simulation techniques; the difficulty of ex-ante and ex-post evaluation from a social perspective. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the implementation of fast-track strategies, when operational criteria are used, is based on quantitative models and techniques. In Brazil, the efficient management of Emergency Care Units, UPAs 24-h, is essential because the UPAs are a fundamental part of the Brazilian health system.

Overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs) is a critical issue in health sectors worldwide. In Saudi Arabia, EDs experience this issue because many patients visit EDs seeking treatment even for a non-emergency health condition. Therefore, in this study, we present and test a solution to help reduce ED overcrowding in Saudi Arabia—a mobile application that we developed using persuasive design principles. The main aims of the application are to discourage patients with non-emergency conditions from arriving at EDs and, if they have already arrived, to manage and encourage them to transfer to primary healthcare centers (PHCs) or less-crowded EDs. The application is framed by eight main design principles (social proof, scarcity, authority, modernity, time-saving, empathy, transparency, and awareness). We tested the application based on a set of role-play evaluation scenarios through a user study with 89 participants. The overall result showed that the application successfully encouraged 73.7% of participants to visit PHCs instead of EDs, discouraged 55.3% from visiting overcrowded EDs, and encouraged 68.4% to transfer from overcrowded EDs to other health centers. Design aspects related to the time-saving and empathy principles were the factors that most influenced participants’ decisions. Overall, our application that incorporates design principles can facilitate tackling the ED overcrowding issue, given that it successfully influenced more than half of the participants. Further, this study has implications for both the human–computer interaction and the health informatics communities because it employs a mobile software solution with design principles to tackle a critical universal issue that affects healthcare quality and patients’ satisfaction.

The number of youth in juvenile detention in Brazil has grown immensely over the past few decades, despite internationally acclaimed children’s legislation (in 1990) that established a new framework for youth and adolescent criminal justice. National law grants great discretion to prosecutors and judges who do not always adhere to international standards. This chapter provides an overview of juvenile justice in Brazil and groundwork for understanding the potential and challenges of the Brazilian system. A descriptive methodology includes analysis of federal data from 2006 to 2016 and a literature review. The study finds that discretionary legislation, coupled with selective policing, and priority in deprivation of liberty have resulted in the expansion of the detention system, overcrowding and deterioration of detention conditions.

History of tuberculosis (TB) most probably begins around 70,000 years ago when Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and humans co-evolved during their partnership. During the Neolithic Revolution, the size of the population and its farming and animal domestication activities contributed to the maintenance and transmission of Mtb. TB continued its increase beginning around 1750 owing to the deplorable conditions prevailing during the Industrial Revolution: overcrowding, malnutrition, absent sanitation. Even after Robert Koch’s seminal discovery of Mtb in 1882, methods of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention advanced only slowly. After a continuous decline in the nineteenth century, TB mortality increased sharply in many countries during World Wars I and II. In 1944, first effective anti-TB antibiotics were developed and better ones followed in the next years. Major impediments to TB eradication or elimination today are drug resistances and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) created the End TB Strategy in 2014, but achieving its goals appears unlikely by 2030. Possible solutions include widespread treatment for latent TB infection and an effective vaccine.

This chapter follows the initial considerations regarding lobotomy at the state mental hospitals in the 1940s. The first lobotomy on a patient from a state mental hospital was conducted in Vordingborg in 1944. Using information from patient records, internal reports and the hospital’s correspondence with the Directorate concerning lobotomy, the chapter investigates the selection of the first small group of patients from the Vordingborg mental hospital. The chapter also examines if various factors such as overcrowding contributed to the decision of Vordingborg psychiatrists to let their patients undergo neurosurgical treatment.

A massive growth in the modernize population, because of disabled people, patients after surgery those whom cannot have ability to move and even wash themselves. Tied on their own bed, has created many problems including the need for massage service and convenient healthcare to help patients body relax and shampoo themselves which reduce medical care staff, otherwise, most of them feel inferior when someone touches their head when they are sick or having dermatological problem. In this paper, on-going projects related to essential technology for reducing work force and overcrowding in Vietnamese hospital are discussed. We propose robotic autonomous scalp massage and shampoo combine with traditional Vietnamese’s acupuncture massage to aid in resolving problems that people suffering from bed sick are experiencing, reports on design, service personalization and deployment of an assistive robot to support elderly people, disabled and patients with scalp care. Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm in artificial neural network are applied to train from collected acupuncture points to give the best trajectories following patient’s symptoms, analyzed for diagnosing and evaluating hairy scalp issues for the neural network input variables associated with body values such as height, weight, age or race which plays an important role in the composition of the multi-layer perceptron. The experimented and analyzed from multi-modal data collection of the first ever longitudinal field trials from patients throughout each experiment, indoor environments demonstrate by people with unmovable needs care. From the experiments, it indicates the ability of combining the mechanical system with 2-DOFs, human scalp massages by water jets with trajectories predicted by machine learning based on physical factors to meet the desired position on human scalp, providing enhanced resilience to being treated patients.

The use of ayahuasca for healing trauma and resolving associated symptoms has gained increasing attention recently. As a result, a surge of trauma survivors has converged on healing centers around the world in pursuit of ayahuasca therapy. Although research into ayahuasca has suggested it is safe and holds great therapeutic potential for mental health disorders, the potential for harm has been highlighted in recent years, particularly around set and setting with inexperienced facilitators and centers exploiting this rapidly growing market. The current study reports on data from a retrospective cross-sectional online survey of ayahuasca users either with or without a self-reported history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Data reported here capture the potential risks of ayahuasca use in people with a history of PTSD and how they compare to the reported benefits. Results suggest that while most people find ayahuasca to be helpful (79–97%) and not dangerous (67–76%), people with a history of PTSD were 10% more likely to disclose information about dangerous experiences associated with taking ayahuasca, compared to those with no reported history of PTSD. Qualitative assessments of open-ended responses regarding dangerous experiences included feelings that the facilitators were inexperienced, not having sufficient physical and psychological support, inadequate facilities for purging, overcrowding in ceremonies, lack of follow-up care, and insufficient screening of participants with psychotic disorders who became violent. While most people found the experience to be helpful and healing, people are reporting unfavorable responses to ayahuasca, particularly those with a history of PTSD. Further investigation is necessary to develop best practices that ensure safety for participants with PTSD when seeking ayahuasca therapy.

The objective of this study was to investigate the methodological theoretical framework of the Lean approach in overcrowded emergency services with the implementation of Fast Track. With the integrative review method, it was defined the guiding question: Which Lean principle is related to the application of Fast Track in overcrowded emergency services? The following database were used: Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus in which 268 records were collected and 14 articles were selected. It was verified that Fast Track is a fast flow that favors the application of the principle of Continuous Flow, essential in emergency services with overcrowding, as it aims to reduce the average length of stay of patients with lower acuity. It was identified in the methodological theoretical framework the demand for more in-depth studies; and that Fast Track is an approach to reducing overcrowding in emergency services associated with the Continuous Flow principle. It was concluded that Fast Track proved to be an effective management strategy in reducing the average length of stay and waiting time of patients, which resulted in improvements in the flow of care and increased patient satisfaction, consequently providing improved performance in the emergency services.

Within the context of the rapid worldwide growth of tourism frequently accompanied by overcrowding and overtourism issues, this paper juxtaposes resident and visitor perceptions of tourism impacts on Croatia’s busy Crikvenica-Vinodol Riviera seeking to better understand destination social carrying capacity implications as these may inform improvement in collaborative destination management and governance. The analysis shows significant differences in perception of tourism, with predominantly positive views among visitors versus the more critical residents. As a means of overcoming the threat of diverging perceptions becoming a limiting factor of sustainable tourism development, the paper suggests destination management should be oriented towards building destination cohesion and advancing community values. This implies better monitoring of a destination’s tourism carrying capacity parameters, further community capacity building in tourism, improving the quality of tourism planning and capacity for plan implementation, as well as promoting a collaborative culture among local stakeholders.

There are, of course, some counterarguments against my proposal of creating Revived Originals. They raise important issues. But even if some of the objections are perfectly legitimate, they should be considered in comparison to the alternatives discussed above. These either cannot be implemented due to conflicts of interest or do not seem to show any productive results. The proposed alternatives only partially take into account current conditions affecting both residents and tourists interested in culture. They may still be subject to overcrowding with long queues, noise, stress, vandalism, crime, and improper behavior. In addition, one should consider the future prospects of overtourism, which paint a gloomy picture. The measures proposed or taken so far do not seem to be an adequate response to this discouraging outlook.

Mental-health-related visits to emergency departments are common and steadily increasing [1–3]. More than ever, emergency departments (EDs) have become burdened with longer wait times, overcrowding, and complex patient safety issues. Patients with primary psychiatric complaints, numbering approximately 53 million from 1992 to 2001 in the United States, now constitute 12.5% of all adult ED visits [1, 4]. This rise in mental health visits corresponds to a 38% increase [5]. At the same time, there has been an increasing shortage of inpatient psychiatric beds nationally, with a decline in a number of inpatient beds per capita of 62% from 1970 to 2003 [6]. Frequently, there is an inherent challenge or even fear in dealing with these patients and their behavioral symptoms due to discomfort in diagnosing and managing psychiatric conditions, such that the medical aspects of psychiatric care are overshadowed in order to arrange a rapid disposition. Sigmund Freud once famously noted, “When I treat a psychoneurotic, for instance, hysterical patient … I am compelled to find explanations for the first symptoms of the malady, which have long since disappeared, as well as for those existing symptoms which have brought the patient to me; and I find a former problem easier to solve than the more exigent one of today” [7].

The global coronavirus pandemic spread throughout 2020, with countries in Europe experiencing tremendous socioeconomic impacts, including a cliff-like drop in citizens’ mobility, overcrowding of hospitals in metropolitan cities, an economic recession, massive furloughs and an increase in unemployment, as well as a significant transition to more remote working.

The pre-war annual asylum death rate of under ten per cent rose to 12 per cent in 1915–1916, and 20 per cent in 1918. There was little alarm, because causes of death were the same as pre-war, often infectious diseases, so it did not indicate staff failing in their duty of care, such as if the rise been attributed to “accidents” or suicide. Little was done to stem the rising death rate. A parallel rise did not occur in community dwelling civilians. Numerous practices, known to be unhygienic, risked spreading infection. They included: treating healthy and infectious patients together in open wards; lack of hand washing by laundry and kitchen workers and by patients after using the lavatory; lack of measures to prevent inhalation of mycobacterium tuberculosis; and drying soiled underclothing in the ward to be worn again without washing. Overcrowding, understaffing and war time austerity aggravated the situation.

The emergency department (ED) setting within the healthcare system is quite complex, and it is necessity to perform mathematical modelling to examine the challenge of long waiting times and the ways in which it can influence EDs and patients experiencing and predict conditions that need to be urgently addressed. In addition, the ways in which certain mathematical models could help in assessing solutions to issues like waiting time and ensure that suitable care is offered to patients at all times based on decision matrix and related big data source is therefore analyzed. Various studies have been carried out in the last decade that examine the challenges faced by EDs to offer research evidence that can help in enhancing the ways in which health providers offer care to their patients and in today worlds with crisis and hazard mode like COVID-19, healthcare systems are barely able to tackle this pandemic.

Frequent public incidents in crowd gathering areas are causing social concerns. This paper first discusses different cases of crowd gathering based on Edward Hall’s personal space theory and construct a novel crowd gathering pattern model. Based on the model, our modified multi-column convolutional neural network is proposed for extracting the overcrowding. For evaluating its effectiveness, a heterogeneous multi-granularity real-time dynamic surveillance video containing different perspectives is integrated, and a new crowd gathering safety situation assessment method is applied. We finally report our real-world application in Suzhou landmark - Urban Fountain Square for crowd gathering safety situation assessment and show that the method can definitely improve the safety of crowd gathering areas.

Although healthcare worker well-being is posited as a mediator between organisational factors and patient care, there has been little empirical examination of this. Moreover, nearly all off of this research investigates such relationships at the individual level, ignoring the fact that factors at the departmental, organisational, sectoral, and national levels all impact on working conditions, workers’ well-being, and patient care. We first review the literature linking organisational factors (e.g. overcrowding, resourcing, hospital type) to healthcare workers’ well-being and patient care. Few studies have tested well-being as a mediator, with nearly all of these involving nurses and burnout, and focus predominately on organisational leadership and staffing levels. Based on this, we propose a conceptual model that brings together organisational factors (i.e. structure, people, external influences), the work environment (i.e. job demands, job resources), healthcare worker well-being (i.e. negative well-being, positive well-being, individual states) and patient care outcomes (i.e. individual and organisational level); with healthcare workers’ well-being postulated as a mediator. We also highlight that in testing the proposed model and to advance our understanding of this relationship, researchers should account and overcome the lack of theory, issues of measurement, and shortcomings in research designs.

With a population of 0.8 million, Bhutan is a small, mountainous, landlocked country located to the north of India. Nationally representative data on internal migration were collected for the first time in 2005 as part of the first nationwide census, with questions focussing on lifetime migration, duration of residence, reasons for moving and mover characteristics. Census data collected in 2017 show that the Bhutanese are highly mobile with 40 per cent having moved between districts since birth. With nearly 40 per cent of its population resident in cities, up from 15 per cent in 1994, Bhutan is in the midst of the urban transition and is dominated by rural-to- urban migration. Intermediate levels of migration effectiveness coupled with moderate intensities underpin average population redistribution. Migration flows follow a clear east-west direction that reflects a marked spatial gradient in levels of socioeconomic development. Urban areas in the west of the country have experienced net population gains at the last two censuses, triggering policy concerns about overcrowding and service shortages, which have resulted in improved infrastructure provision in rural areas in the east of the country in an effort to curb rural-to-urban migration.

Triage is the French name for sorting. It is a common method used to discern who should be evacuated or treated first among a group of injured or severely ill patients. It has become a crucial function of the healthcare providers in charge of emergency services and overcrowded outpatient (clinics and emergency departments) or inpatient (trauma and intensive care units) environments. These areas are the most in need of an efficient and accurate system to identify the correct patients and the reason we focus on their challenges in this chapter. Triage is a very complex and challenging process, which requires knowledge, training, and experience. Unfortunately, having all the required skills does not guarantee an accurate triage.

As far as the Italian prison system is concerned, the public authorities have always considered the Catholic Church and its religious care providers as indispensable partners for implementing the rehabilitation programme, as established in Article 27 of the Constitution. It remains that in the last decades those authorities have substantially failed to reach this very goal, which is mainly because of their incapacity to make the Italian criminal justice system more efficient and reduce overcrowding in prisons, whose population, on the other hand, is increasingly changing, especially from a religious point of view.

The management of tuberculosis (TB) is complicated. TB management requires a concerted and coordinated effort from different medical disciplines, sectors in society, and all government levels in a country. The management of TB includes preventive measures such as vaccination and addressing social problems such as overcrowding and malnutrition. TB management involves the treatment of latent or active TB and addressing the side effects of medications and the interaction with other medicines taken for comorbid conditions. Treatment of TB also includes the non-pharmacologic management of the infection or its complications. Challenges in the management of TB include the emergence of drug-resistant TB, non-adherence by patients due to the long duration of treatment, the HIV pandemic, which fuels TB and extra-pulmonary TB. Internationally, heads of state under the World Health Organization are making efforts to eliminate TB. This effort would require the use of every available resource and technology to achieve. Positron emission tomography integrated with computed tomography could address some of the challenges in the management of TB.

Although allergic diseases were historically reported more commonly in industrialized populations, in the past decades, their rates have been on the rise globally, especially in developing countries. Trends observed in various developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America show this increasing prevalence has been attributed to the effects of modernization in those countries. Multiple risk factors of allergic diseases, such as obesity, tobacco exposure, living in close proximity of factories, or simply overcrowding, are linked to urbanization and modern life styles. It is important to note that despite lower disease rates, the impact of allergic diseases is potentially higher in developing countries with limited resources than that observed in developed countries. This is at least partly due to a lack of knowledge and inadequate access to health care. The lack of awareness about the rise of allergies must be addressed in order to decrease the burden of these diseases.

School district stakeholders including administrators, board members, and parents often look nervously at plans for new housing, anticipating school overcrowding or the costs of adding classrooms or building new schools. To answer the question of how many students might be generated by new housing development, we identify comparable existing developments and calculate student generation rates (SGRs) by school level. SGRs are the average number of public school students per housing unit. A naive approach simply adds the estimated future students to existing enrollment. However, growth or decline in the population of students residing in existing homes must also be included in a housing-based enrollment forecast.

With a population of 1.21 billion according to the 2011 census, India is a culturally diverse, lower-middle income country located in south Asia. Data on internal migration have been collected since 1971, primarily by means of decennial censuses, with questions focussing on lifetime migration, duration of residence, reasons for moving and mover characteristics, coupled with regular household surveys. Data from the 2011 Census show that Indians exhibit a low level of permanent internal migration with an ACMI below 8%, which is thought to be substituted by temporary circular migration, particularly among males. Indians display early migration profiles, with peaks at age 20 for females and 25 for males, driven largely by marriage for the former and employment for the latter. With about 30% of its population residing in urban areas, India appears to be at an early stage in the urban transition and contribution of rural-to-urban migration to urban growth is not dominant. Moderate levels of migration effectiveness coupled with low intensities underpin limited population redistribution. Spatial patterns reflect pronounced and persistent state-level variations in socioeconomic conditions where developed and urbanised states register net gains while states at lower levels of development record net losses. Despite a low level of permanent internal migration by Asian and global standards, the Indian government remains concerned about rural-to-urban migration around issues of overcrowding and infrastructure provision.

Increasing healthcare costs have motivated researchers to seek ways to more efficiently use medical resources. The aim of our study was to adopt the explanatory data-mining approach to identify characteristics of emergency department (ED) visits for ED management. To that end, we adopted a behavior-based decision tree (DT) induction method that considers medical diagnoses and individual patients’ information, i.e., 11 input variables, in order to analyze characteristics of patients’ visits to EDs and predict the length of the stays. We interpreted the results based on the communicability and consistency of the DT, represented as a behavior-based DT profile in order to increase its explanatory power. Among the major preliminary findings, the DT with International Classification of Diseases diagnosis codes achieved better clinical values for explaining the characteristics of patients’ visits. Our results can serve as a reference for ED personnel to examine overcrowding conditions as part of medical management.

Hospital emergency departments (EDs) operate under significant pressure worldwide. Overcrowding is a frequent occurrence, caused by a combination of high presentation numbers, and long delays in the admission of patients due to a lack of availability of hospital beds. Understanding the factors which influence length of stay (LoS) in the ED is a vital aspect of any strategy to improve patient flow. The determinants of ED patient flow are complex and varied, due to the diverse population of patients competing for limited resources. This research uses Coxian phase-type distributions to cluster patients into groups by their LoS, using a unique diagram for improved communication of patient flow issues. A novel application of survival analysis is presented to simultaneously evaluate the effect of patient attributes, system factors, and overcrowding on ED LoS. The approach is demonstrated with an application to data from a hospital in South Australia. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The life of human beings is getting more dynamic in this era. So, every person needs to have a safer driving feature which supports their dynamic life. Self-driving or driverless car is getting popular day by day due to its low transportation cost which can result in better accessibility of those persons belonging to economically backward classes. A driverless car can drive in an autonomous way towards the destination safely with the help of GPS based road map which can be downloaded from a GPS server in collaboration with GPS satellites. But the problem with this present system is that if the number of the driverless car increases in a city that will lead to the congestion which results in overcrowding of GPS server. So the delay in the system will increase proportionally. One solution to this problem may be the cooperative communication through which vehicular communications can improve the wireless transmission capacity and reduces the server overloading due to its distributed features. In this paper, we have proposed a next-generation vehicular technology using an ad-hoc cooperative communication system consisting of vehicles and BTSs with small database consists of surrounding destinations.

Negative impacts associated with allowing mass numbers of people into one area occur in a variety of ways. Overcrowding at an attraction creates issues with vandalism, litter, theft and degradation of the site, which in turn impedes tourists from experiencing full satisfaction with the destination due to these problems. In addition, destinations may become more commercialized in order to provide goods and services to tourists to generate more profits, causing a loss of the traditional culture and values of the destination. As a result, some of the more popular tourist destinations have increase fees, imposed fines, staggered hours of entrance and exit times, have hired educated staff members and have partnered with organisations to alleviate the negative impacts associated with overtourism at their heritage and cultural sites.

Dermatologic disease is among the most frequently reported health problems in homeless and refugee populations. Overcrowding, lack of access to bathing and laundry facilities, and increased exposure to the elements contribute to increased rates of disease in this population. Because it is the most visible part of the body, the skin also is a key part of human interaction. Changes in appearance of the skin, whether from purposeful alteration or due to a disease process, impact self-concept as well as perception by others. Symptoms of skin problems may include itching, pain, embarrassment, and social isolation. Because of these features, skin problems may be of particularly high concern for youth and may lead young people to seek medical attention, thus opening the door for discussions about other health and social concerns. This chapter first reviews the cause and management of some of the more common dermatology conditions with some practical tips for management. In the second portion of this chapter, cutaneous conditions that are of particular concern among homeless and refugee youth are reviewed.

India has seen tremendous advancements in the field of mental health over the past decades. Yet, India, the world’s second most populated country, continues to contribute disproportionately to the global burden of disease compared to the other middle-income and neighbouring countries. According to the National Survey of Mental Health Resources, a striking deficit of 77% psychiatrists, 97% clinical psychologists and 90% social workers was reported against a standard reference of 1 psychiatrist, 1.5 clinical psychologists and 2 social workers per 100,000 persons. The high demand for mental health services and the overcrowding of medical facilities in India increase the possibility that the mental health element contributing to somatization may go untreated by medical practitioners.

Due to overcrowding in hospital waiting rooms, queue abandonment by frustrated patients remains a great problem. In the out-patient department, patients are normally served on a first-come-first-serve policy. Since there exists a distance decay association, whereby patients living further away from healthcare facilities experience worse health outcomes, it is these patients that are likely to return home without medical assistance. In the developing world, health facilities are few and scattered such that patients walk long distance to reach to the nearest health center. Triage can play an important role to ensure that such patients have a better chance to access medical care. Unfortunately, all the existing triage systems do not consider patient distance. In this paper, we propose a distance integrated triage system. We propose using patient distance as a queue shuffling variable. The patient’s vitals are captured by a kit of bio-sensors. This is unlike the existing triage systems that are associated with mis-triage due to lack of discriminator use or numerical miscalculations. Our work is based on the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital triage system which is based on the Cape Triage System.

This chapter adopts the ‘Nagel’-approach that was introduced in Chapter 1 and it continues and concludes the exploration of the functions of electronic monitoring, which was started in Chapter 2. Ten different functions are being discussed: incapacitation, profit maximalisation, protection of victims, reintegration, responsabilisation, restoration, tackling overcrowding, transcarceration, verification and widening the net.

Squatter settlement is defined as a low residential area, which has developed without legal right to the land or permission from the concerned authorities to build, and as a result, of their illegal status, infrastructure and services are usually inadequate (UN-Habitat 2003). On the other hand, slums are contiguous settlements where inhabitants are characterized by insecure residential status, inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and other basic infrastructure and services, poor housing quality, and overcrowding (UN-Habitat 2003). Both are form of informal settlements that are not formally planned.

The Slovenian prison administration was established in 1995 to manage six prisons, which are separate facilities operating in 14 different locations, and one correctional home. Differentiation of imprisoned persons is in force based on gender, age, nature of the sentence, duration of the sentence, and degree of security. Despite the prioritization of a security component, a strong rehabilitation model is still present in the operation of the individual prisons. The Slovenian prison system has been challenged with an increasing prison population in recent years, which has caused overcrowding in several of the prisons. The prison population increased by more than 40% over the period 2005–2016. The structure of the prison population shows that prisoners sentenced for property crime present almost half of the prison population in Slovenia, followed by those who were sentenced for crimes against life and limb, and crimes against human health (mostly drug-related offenses). The number of prison workers increased by approximately 6% in the period 2005–2016. Prison officers present the largest group of prison workers in Slovenia (approximately 60%).

The case study of Stamford Hill offers a relevant example of interactions between population groups similar in many respects, but each guarding its unique cultural identity. At the municipal level, the research area of Stamford Hill is a segregated Haredi neighbourhood, where demographic, social and economic features have heightened the growing pressure of the population on urban space in recent decades. A closer look at the inner-neighbourhood level, however, exposes the essential “micro-segregation” mechanism that takes place both at the building and neighbourhood levels. The relatively high involvement of the leadership in the community’s daily life leads to a residential concentration of Hasidic communities within walking distance of the community’s religious institutions and overcrowding in these areas. Stamford Hill offers lessons to the literature on segregation and the broad field of inner-city dynamics. This chapter reveals the simultaneous influence of building- and neighbourhood-level factors on the segregation pattern, which contributes to estimating the role of residential dynamics in inner cities for retaining self-identities and reproducing social segregation. It is the individuals’ capacity for self-accountability that keeps the Hasidic community in Stamford Hill functioning ethically. The accepted norm whereby married women devote themselves to the socialisation of the younger generation and housekeeping places the responsibility for making a living mostly on the men. In particular, individuals are expected to organise their lives in a way that maintains religious commitments and communal identity while adapting and negotiating this adaptation to the modern reality in every aspect of their life. Within the Hasidic subcommunities, indirect collaboration within the wider Haredi society of Stamford Hill enables the Hasidic to contribute to the creation of a defined enclave that allows the conservation of lifestyles and cultures. The extended collaboration of the individuals, together with relatively weak community discipline, support and supervision, results in the heterogeneous residential pattern of the inner-city enclave of Stamford Hill.

Urban villages emerge with the rapid urbanization process in many developing countries, and bring serious social and economic challenges to urban authorities, such as overcrowding and low living standards. A comprehensive understanding of the locations and regional boundaries of urban villages in a city is crucial for urban planning and management, especially when urban authorities need to renovate these regions. Traditional methods greatly rely on surveys and investigations of city planners, which consumes substantial time and human labor. In this work, we propose a low-cost and automatic framework to accurately identify urban villages from high-resolution remote sensing satellite imagery. Specifically, we leverage the Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask-RCNN) model for end-to-end urban village detection and segmentation. We evaluate our framework on the city-wide satellite imagery of Xiamen, China. Results show that our framework successfully detects 87.18% of the urban villages in the city, and accurately segments their regional boundaries with an IoU of 74.48%.

It is unrealistic to expect rail passengers to experience a comfortable journey while travelling in crowded trains. Given that passenger behaviour is one of the contributing factors of crowding, understanding and promoting changes in their behaviour would help moderate overcrowding. Therefore, this study aims to develop strategies to encourage passenger behaviour change. Focusing particularly on the provision of train occupancy information, Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is applied to gain a systematic understanding about constraints of the behaviour in the rail system environment. Participant observations, staff interview, and online survey data were used to develop an Abstraction Hierarchy (AH), which was validated with two rail subject-matter experts. The output enhance our understanding about passenger behaviour while travelling in crowded conditions, and provide insights about how rail service providers could better assist passengers’ decision making to inform real behaviour change. The AH provides the foundation for how to reduce crowding by supporting passengers’ decision making so they can select less crowded trains or carriages.