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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed the lifestyles of individuals all over the world, induced a fear of virus transmission and confusion, and brought about many other potentially devastating psychological impacts. To minimize the spread of COVID-19, governments all over the world have implemented various practices including lockdowns, home quarantines, spatial distancing, and online teaching within schools, colleges, and/or universities. The present cross-sectional study was carried out to investigate the associations between socio-demographic factors and fear of COVID-19 among undergraduate and postgraduate students in public universities Lahore, Pakistan. Data were collected utilizing an online Google Forms survey based on a convenience sample of 397 undergraduate and postgraduate students of public universities (78% female; mean age = 24 years), enrolled in the subject of education (54%) and psychology (46%) when the virus was spreading rapidly throughout Pakistan. All the participants completed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale and questions concerning socio-demographic variables. Results indicated that the fear of COVID-19 was higher among the education students and female students. Fear of COVID 19 (i.e., scores on the FCV-19S) was positively associated with the participants’ personal or family history of illness and number of deaths in family. The level of fear of COVID-19 was different among the students who had physical illness, psychological illness, and no any history of illness personally or in their family.

With the abrupt transition to observing physical distancing as a result of COVID-19, applied behavior analysts were faced with the sudden need to modify their service delivery model, while at the same time managing personal difficulties brought about by the pandemic. The present article provides a description of the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior analyst workforce currently providing clinical services in the United States. We conducted a survey to assess work conditions, burnout, and productivity of behavior analysts at various certification levels. These data provide a snapshot of the impact of COVID-19 on the workforce. Overall, one third of the participants reported experiencing job insecurity, and almost half of participants reported decreased productivity and increased burnout, with remote workers more severely affected. Taken together, these factors could compromise the ability of behavior analysts to adequately provide services to their clients. We provide recommendations for behavioral health agencies for supporting staff during extreme situations such as a pandemic.

In order for physical distancing directives to be effective at lowering and flattening the epidemic peak during a pandemic, individuals must adhere to confinement guidelines. Recent reviews highlight the paucity of research on empirical correlates of adherence to physical distancing and quarantine directives.In this cross-sectional study, 1003 individuals were recruited using quota sampling to form a sample approximately representative of the population of Quebec (Canada) in terms of age, gender, and urbanicity. Participants completed an online survey on adherence to physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey evaluated socio-demographic, health, cognitive, emotional, and social factors related to physical distancing.Individuals aged 70 and older (OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.04-2.67), women (OR = 1.35, 95% CI = 1.02-1.79), and those who were not essential workers (OR = 3.28, 95% CI = 2.24-4.81) reported more physical distancing. Injunctive personal norms (OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.23-2.31), perceived benefits of physical distancing to others (OR = 1.47, 95% CI = 1.12-1.93), and descriptive social norms (OR = 1.26, 95% CI = 1.04-1.52) were independent predictors of adherence status. Individuals adhered more to physical distancing if they believed that it was their civic duty to do so and that physical distancing helped protect others, and if they perceived that most other people were following these directives. In contrast, perceived personal risk and emotional factors were not independently related to physical distancing.These results highlight the importance of health beliefs and perceived social norms in shaping responses to physical distancing directives. These findings offer insights into ways to frame public health communications to promote physical distancing during a pandemic.RéSUMé: OBJECTIFS: Afin d’assurer l’efficacité des directives de distanciation physique à aplatir la courbe épidémique lors d’une pandémie, les membres de la communauté doivent respecter les règles de confinement. Des revues de la littérature mettent en évidence le manque de données empiriques sur les corrélats de l’adhérence aux directives de distanciation physique et de quarantaine. MéTHODES: Dans cette étude transversale, 1 003 individus ont été recrutés en utilisant une méthode d’échantillonnage par quota afin de constituer un échantillon approximativement représentatif de la population du Québec, Canada, en termes d’âge, de genre, et de ruralité. Les participants ont complété une enquête en ligne sur l’adhérence à la distanciation physique durant la pandémie de la COVID-19. Cette enquête a évalué l’association entre l’adhérence à la distanciation physique et les facteurs sociodémographiques, médicaux, cognitifs, émotionnels, et sociaux. RéSULTATS: Les individus âgés de 70 ans et plus (RC = 1,67, IC95% = 1,04–2,67), les femmes (RC = 1,35, IC95% = 1,02–1,79) et ceux qui n’étaient pas des travailleurs essentiels (RC = 3,28, IC95% = 2,24–4,81) ont rapporté plus de distanciation physique. Les normes injonctives personnelles (RC = 1,67, IC95% = 1,23–2,31), la perception de bénéfices de la distanciation physique pour les autres (RC = 1,47, IC95% = 1,12–1,93), et les normes sociales descriptives (RC = 1,26, IC95% = 1,04–1,52) étaient des facteurs prédictifs indépendants de l’adhérence. L’adhérence à la distanciation physique était plus probable chez les individus qui croyaient qu’il était de leur devoir civique de respecter les directives et que la distanciation physique aidait à protéger les autres, et qui percevaient que la plupart des autres personnes respectaient aussi ces directives. La perception du risque personnel et les facteurs émotionnels n’étaient pas associés de façon indépendante à la distanciation physique. CONCLUSION: Ces résultats soulignent l’importance des croyances sur la santé et des normes sociales perçues dans la réponse aux directives de distanciation physique. Ces résultats suggèrent différentes façons d’optimiser la présentation des communications de santé publique afin de promouvoir la distanciation physique lors d’une pandémie.

In the scenario of COVID-19, the social interaction is limited and distancing. It causes several drawbacks such as decreasing the social constraints among relations and growing the troublesomeness of daily activities. However, this way helps to isolate the infectious disease as well as reduce the number of patients. To overcome these troubles, the service robot plays an excellent solution in this circumstance. Instead of servants, robot could carry the heavy cargo, continuously operate with numerous orders and do not hesitate the hazardous environment. Especially, it can not be affected by the infected disease and ease to disinfect by various chemicals. Therefore, in this paper, an interactive model for the autonomous robot in the healthcare service is proposed. Firstly, several coefficients related to interaction are denoted for the clarification and initial establishment. Later, a model of working space for human that interact with others, is suggested. These zones are categorized based on the needs of socially collaboration and comfortably communication in reality. In our research, the autonomous robot must work in the medical area where both patients and nurses stay. Hence, the missions of robot are not only to avoid obstacles but also cleverly manipulate in the crowd. Owing to this model, the service robot could behave intelligently, perceptively and safely. To validate the our work, the fully interactive model is simulated in the pre-determined situations. The robot must obey the desired commands while the medical constraints are still preserved. From these test results, it could be easily seen that our approach such the interactive model of robot is effective, feasible and reasonable for the healthcare service to prevent the infectious disease in the period of global pandemic.

The spring of 2020 saw the spread of the virus COVID_19. The pandemic context experienced since demanded human physical distancing which results in the closure of universities and schools, ground flights, and closing spaces to stop all forms of gatherings. The forced lockdown to ensure the safety of people, and the government policies to close operations pressed and encouraged employers and employees to adopt telework notwithstanding the short time to prepare everyone for a new model of work. Before the pandemic, telework faced a slow acceptance and adoption in European countries. The pandemic was and still is a driving force for the adoption of telework, in this case considering the remote workplace employees’ domestic environs. A review of literature exposes plenty of information regarding telework benefits and drawbacks, but scarce information is available about the relationship between telework and Academia. This article aims to understand the academia’s experience of working from home, especially the features of home workplace and its impact on the health and wellbeing of the individuals. At the end, the main question is if academics want to stay with any form of telework. The responses obtained revealed that academics want to remain in telework several days a week and have working space conditions to do so. Literature review and online questionnaire performed the theoretical framework and contextual data to support the conclusions achieved. The answers ascertained the experience as a positive one, indicating that home workplaces have comfortable, technical and private conditions and there is a generic expectation to proceed with telework for several days a week.

Smart things are everywhere, from smart watches to smart toys. Children are used to them but they do not know how they are made. Engaging children in the design of smart things can help them learn of them and develop their own. Smart-thing design with children was usually held in person, in informal settings, with a learning by-doing and playful approach, and collaboratively, so as to sustain children’s learning over time. Recently the COVID pandemics has made this type of design with children impossible, e.g., due to physical distancing restrictions. Smart-thing design with children has thus adapted to the mutated settings and moved at a distance. What children can learn when designing at a distance, though, remains an open question. This paper tackles such issue. It reports on at-a-distance design workshops with 20 children, aged 8–16 years old. In this paper, data are processed in relation to children’s learning of smart-thing programming, before and after the workshops. Results indicate that design workshops, held at a distance, can help children learn how to program their own smart thing ideas. A significant positive correlation was also found between age and learning.

Purpose It has been over a year since the first known case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emerged, yet the pandemic is far from over. To date, the coronavirus pandemic has infected over eighty million people and has killed more than 1.78 million worldwide. This study aims to explore “how useful is Reddit social media platform to surveil COVID-19 pandemic?” and “how do people’s concerns/behaviors change over the course of COVID-19 pandemic in North Carolina?”. The purpose of this study was to compare people’s thoughts, behavior changes, discussion topics, and the number of confirmed cases and deaths by applying natural language processing (NLP) to COVID-19 related data. Methods In this study, we collected COVID-19 related data from 18 subreddits of North Carolina from March to August 2020. Next, we applied methods from natural language processing and machine learning to analyze collected Reddit posts using feature engineering, topic modeling, custom named-entity recognition (NER), and BERT-based (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) sentence clustering. Using these methods, we were able to glean people’s responses and their concerns about COVID-19 pandemic in North Carolina. Results We observed a positive change in attitudes towards masks for residents in North Carolina. The high-frequency words in all subreddit corpora for each of the COVID-19 mitigation strategy categories are: Distancing (DIST)—“social distance/distancing”, “lockdown”, and “work from home”; Disinfection (DIT)—“(hand) sanitizer/soap”, “hygiene”, and "wipe"; Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)—“mask/facemask(s)/face shield”, “n95(s)/kn95”, and “cloth/gown”; Symptoms (SYM)—“death”, “flu/influenza”, and “cough/coughed”; Testing (TEST)—“cases”, “(antibody) test”, and “test results (positive/negative)”. Conclusion The findings in our study show that the use of Reddit data to monitor COVID-19 pandemic in North Carolina (NC) was effective. The study shows the utility of NLP methods (e.g. cosine similarity, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, custom NER and BERT-based sentence clustering) in discovering the change of the public's concerns/behaviors over the course of COVID-19 pandemic in NC using Reddit data. Moreover, the results show that social media data can be utilized to surveil the epidemic situation in a specific community.

The rampant spread of COVID-19 has created a catastrophic surge of pandemic pandemonium, with many countries unprepared and under-resourced to address this global public health crisis. At the onset of the pandemic, COVID-19 communication stringently adopted a public health strategy, but there remains an urgency to indigenise global health responses through the lens of glocal knowledge, cultural contexts, and challenges emanating from behavioural change complexities. Two trajectories account for the rise of health communication: the first sets health on the agenda of public health and health promotion, while the second contextualises health communication as a subdiscipline within the field of communication for development and social change. Health communication, embedded within the field of communication for development and social change, allows for a theorisation and critique of public health issues in a South African context through localised cultural contexts and draws impetus to community engagement. This chapter offers a reflective discussion of these theoretical perspectives in the context of the initial phases of the South Africa lockdown. This study adopts a communication for development and social change lens to discuss and critique the initial public health approach of physical distancing in communities during the initial phase of the South African lockdown and how it was localised at community levels. In many cases, deep rural communities have localised their COVID-19 responses, reconstructing and adapting the dominant health messages in marginalised settings, affirming the presence of a glocalised COVID-19 communicative response. This chapter argues that COVID-19 prevention strategies are likely to yield better health outcomes when community voices and dialogue are integrated as part of a comprehensive preventive approach for South African communities.

ABLE Family is a co-located play platform that engages older adults and their family members in intergenerational play and creation, meeting needs during the COVID-19 crisis. Physical distancing is required to ensure the safety of older adults, though, isolation and loneliness contributes to worsening mood, physical and cognitive health. The platform is designed to provide these benefits, by attending to the distinct needs of older adults who are frail and live with dementia. It allows for easy gesture-based engagement for older adults and more sophisticated play for children who, together, draw or paint a picture. The platform encourages low intensity, short duration activity proven to enhance cognitive health in older adults with cognitive impairment and to enhance well-being and mood. ABLE Family also aims to relieve the proven strain experienced by caregivers caring for older adults across private homes, adult residences and care facilities. The platform will operate as an elevated zoom-type platform, allowing multiple players to talk and see each other in real time as they paint and draw together. The final artistic creations can be saved, downloaded and used as screensavers, digital photos or printed.

Smart-health has the potential to create a unique platform for monitoring health. Personalized healthcare using smartphones offer seamless solutions, especially for circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic where physical distancing is inevitable. This paper investigates the efficiency of general smartphone-based healthcare monitoring applications (apps) from a system dynamics perspective. The ongoing research effort introduces a causal model to investigate the factors and inter-relationships that impact the efficiency of smartphone-based healthcare monitoring apps. A careful study suggests that the most important factors of such systems include patient well-being, satisfaction, cost, and performance measure factors (i.e. response speed, accuracy). The proposed idea provides a novel insight of the dynamics of the model to assess the efficiency of various smartphone-based healthcare monitoring apps.

This chapter considers what some have called the ‘inescapable anxieties’ (Rose et al. 2020) associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and we make two specific interventions: the first addresses contagious disease and places of care for people with mental health problems in historical and contemporary times, and the second explores psychological boundaries for those people who already experience severe anxiety conditions. Historically, occupants of ‘asylums’ were particularly at physical risk from the likes of cholera epidemics, but nothing was recognized about any additional burden upon their ‘madness’. During the current crisis, the physical dangers posed to psychiatric patients in closed-institutional environments (hospital wards) because of spatial proximities to bodies are paramount, but so too is a concern for the mental health of inpatients. The psychological effects of COVID-19 on those with existing mental ill-health outside of inpatient settings are also considered, particularly for those who already practice socio-spatial distancing, micro-boundary maintenance, and constant vigilance against perceived biohazards. We critically consider public commentary on these anxious pandemic geographies by both those with lived experience and those who staff psychiatric and psychological services.

Focusing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of non-medical amputation in literary and cinematic narratives, this chapter, through a focus on embodiment and affect, explores the cultural and political—and often gendered—signification of corporeal dismemberment. Distancing itself from a psychoanalytic reading of amputation, it moves toward a politicized, historical, and specifically gendered reading, examining amputation as an expression and contestation of social values and hierarchies. Examining W. C. Morrow’s “His Unconquerable Enemy” (1889), Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Case of Lady Sannox” (1894), and the silent feature The Unknown (1927), the chapter shows how concerns of power, control, and gender are intricately linked in these amputation narratives.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has a clear potential for a prolonged global pandemic, high mortality and overload of health systems. Until vaccines become widely available, the only available approaches to infection prevention are case isolation, contact and quarantine tracking, physical distancing, decontamination, and hygiene measures. The paper considers the conceptual principles of combining the bases of transparency and confidentiality of personal life and the need to track personal contacts, substantiates the need for such a combination and provides a possible technical solution using blockchain technology. The practical development and deployment of the system based on such protocols will allow each citizen to track the personal history of probable contact with infected persons or other potential risks (including deciding on the need for self-isolation or additional examination). In this case, the decentralized system guarantees the privacy of such information both for each participant (due to the inability to determine the personal data of a potentially infected person) and for the system as a whole.

Netting individuals separated from each other by vast distances; the present condition of COVID-19 needs art and its extraordinary capacity to connect human beings and integrate scientific disciplines. We can predict that the COVID-19 pandemic would leave the mind lonely and vulnerable to diseases, for, on the one hand, the COVID-19 pandemic and related problems, in particular social isolation, are itself stressor. On the other hand, studies confirm the potential of COVID-19 to involve the central nervous system by affecting the immune system, either directly or indirectly. The COVID-19 condition, thus, calls for a necessary compensation of loneliness to reduce the psychological impact of the pandemic. Not only art can fulfill this purpose by meeting social affiliation needs, but also its related creativity is a definite achievement of the performer while acting as a motivation facilitator of creation for the observer. Besides, artworks that illustrate effective hygiene behaviors and physical distancing in an easy-to-understand manner could help health information systems to control the spread of COVID-19. The integration of art with biomedical science applied for simulation of the infected population, lung imaging data, and the viral surface has been useful for prediction of the spread of disease and earlier diagnosis of COVID-19 by imaging techniques and might be a contributor to drug discovery for COVID-19. Also, arts admirably influence the immunoemotional regulatory system so that not only would it enable humanity to tolerate quarantine but also enhance antiviral immunity. More interestingly, the effects of dance have been observed in children, elderly, healthcare workers, and pregnant women, which have been of special attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. In summary, arts provide us powerful tools for tolerating the quarantine time and enhancing the immune system, educating behavioral tips for hygiene practices and physical distancing and in psychosocial care of vulnerable populations during the pandemic.

Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, public health policies urge physical distancing (also known as social distancing) of 2 m (6 feet) when walking outside in public spaces. This survey-based study reports on changes in general pedestrian behaviours due to pandemic conditions such as reduction in frequency of daily walking, and lack of comfort when in proximity of others. Responses to common urban pedestrian scenarios identified emerging adaptive strategies used by adults to maintain physical distancing. The two main strategies are Avoidance (stepping off one’s path, crossing the road) and Encounter (stopping to let others pass, continuing the path of travel). Decisions to use one physical distancing strategy over another are related to the perceived traffic safety risks associated with the scenarios. For the low- and moderate-risk traffic scenarios, stepping off the path to avoid others is the preferred strategy. In the high-risk traffic scenarios, stopping on the path to let others pass or continuing to walk are preferred to stepping into traffic, even though physical distancing will not be maintained. Results from the study have implications for educational campaigns to promote effective physical distancing strategies, as well as planning for urban infrastructure to promote walking for health and mobility.

When bioethics first appeared many practitioners of the new discipline were theologians and religious scholars. The original core of the bioethical literature was produced by philosophers and theologians. Both disciplines were associated with broad and critical perspectives on relevant moral challenges. However, such disciplinary characteristics quickly disappeared when bioethics evolved into a separate area of study with its own professional and disciplinary specifics. Theologians (and philosophers) rapidly morphed into bioethicists distancing themselves from exclusively academic analysis and focusing on practical issues in clinical medicine and research.

We build an agent-based model for evaluating the spatial and functional design of supermarket checkout zones and the effectiveness of safety regulations related to distancing that have been introduced after the COVID-19 outbreak. The model is implemented in the NetLogo simulation platform and calibrated to actual point of sale data from one of major European retail chains. It enables realistic modeling of the checkout operations as well as of the airborne diffusion of SARS-CoV-2 particles. We find that opening checkouts in a specific order can reduce epidemic risk, but only under low and moderate traffic conditions. Hence, redesigning supermarket layouts to increase distances between the queues can reduce risk only if the number of open checkouts is sufficient to serve customers during peak hours.

Covid-19 exacerbated and brought to light some of the inequalities and vulnerable conditions of millions of people in the big metropoles of South Africa. The communities of Cape Town responded in a timely way to the risks associated with the pandemic to limit its dangerous potential and find solutions to support people in critical situations. These are due to existing critical medical conditions (TB and HIV rates), impossibility to practice physical distancing (particularly in the informal settlements of the cities), food insecurity related to poverty and increased rate of unemployment, lack of running water and hygiene possibilities, and potential violence increase (particularly related to gender). Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions, particularly connected to the use of social media, allowed for deploying support respecting physical distancing as well as security and medical measures. At the same time, the solutions and approaches oriented to social solidarity amongst communities created the bases for reducing the social divide. The formation of networks of support which reached out for the needs of the most vulnerable people, proved to be problem solving oriented and succeeded in developing cooperative approaches that involved groups of people who have previously never encountered. Considering the still deep digital divide, Cape Town could not count on Smart Cities’ approaches to fight the pandemic, but it proved it could rely on Smart Communities responses. The case study displays the potential to use ICTs to connect, debate, suggest, and deploy solutions to respond in a resilient way to a crisis. The responses highlight the role of e-Participation from the bottom to combine solutions offered by ICT and reactivity and creativity of communities. The approaches further opened the way to the reduction of the social divide in one of the countries with the highest inequality rate in the world.

Humans’ perception of money often is like a fish’s perception of water. Fish see water as neutral, unchangeable, like a natural law. Similarly, many of us consider money a neutral element that enables our individual desires and societal goals. Money is seen to be like a thermometer: we insert it into water and it simply measures the temperature. But money is not neutral. If we want to understand the nature of water, we need first to step out of the it, then examine it. The same is true of the monetary system. Only by distancing ourselves from it do we become able to see that the monetary system in its current unbalanced form forces us onto a non-sustainable path: it enhances income and wealth disparity, pushes us onto a forced growth trajectory, and is intrinsically unstable, favoring short-term private yields. This system acts in a mainly pro-cyclical manner and exacerbates anxiety, greed, and competition while reducing social capital such as trust and solidarity. And despite advanced new technologies and well-intended individual lifestyle changes, the monetary system prevents us from achieving a more sound, stable and sustainable future. In consequence, more of the same simply will generate more of these unwanted, one-sided and unbalanced results—over and over again.

Remote health monitoring and medication systems are becoming prevalent owing to the advances in sensing and connectivity technologies as well as the social and economical demands due to high health care costs as well as low availability of skilled health care providers. The significance of such devices and coordination are also highlighted in the context of recent pandemic outbreaks underlying the need for physical distancing as well as even lock-downs globally. Though such devices bring forth large scale benefits, being the safety critical nature of such applications, one has to be vigilant regarding the potential risk factors. Apart from the device and application level faults, ensuring the secure operation becomes paramount due to increased network connectivity of these systems and services. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for identification of cyber threats and vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them in the context of remote medication and monitoring devices. We specifically elaborate our approach and present the results using a case study of an electronic medication device.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic shook the world in ways not seen since the pandemic influenza of 1918-1919. As of late August 2020, over 25 million persons had been infected, and we will see the global death toll exceed one million by the end of 2020. Both are minimum estimates. All segments of society have been drastically affected. Schools worldwide have been forced to close due to illness and absenteeism, transmission and risk to vulnerable members of the school community, and community concerns. The decision to reopen school during a pandemic will have a tremendous impact on children's safety, growth, and well-being. Not opening invites social isolation and suboptimal educational experiences, especially for youth whose computing assets and online access are limited and those with special needs. The opening has hazards as well, and the mitigation of these risks is the topic of this chapter. Opening schools requires careful considerations of benefits, risks, and precautions. Guiding principles for safety and strategic application of the principles in each educational niche are critical issues to consider during school reopening. The fundamental principles of disease control involve school-directed initiatives (physical distancing and mask use, hand/face and surface cleansing, administrative controls, engineering controls) and individual-level risk reduction approaches to maximize adherence to new guidelines. The school-initiated "top-down" approaches and the individual-level "bottom-up" approaches must be synergized, as no single method will ensure safety. We discuss how to effectively layer strategies in each educational space to increase safety. Since the vulnerability of children has been heightened during this pandemic crisis, we highlight the special considerations for mental health support that should be considered by schools. The safety principles, disease control strategies, and other critical issues discussed here will serve as a starting point for developing a safe, comprehensive, and feasible reopening plan.

Given the lack of interview-based research in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) literature, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews about people’s experiences with AI. From those interviews, many important themes emerged and we focused this paper on people’s experiences with privacy violations. We used the Communication Privacy Management Theory (CPM) to analyze distancing behaviors (avoidance or withdrawal) resulting from Boundary Turbulence (privacy violations) with people’s voice-activated phones and Google Search. Through this analysis, we found evidence that distancing behaviors may 1.) be able to transfer from one device to another; and 2.) not depend on the trustworthiness of a particular device or application company. This paper concludes with recommendations for applying the CPM framework more intentionally and rigorously to people’s experiences with voice-activated systems.

Reflective of this COVID-19 era, Maxine Greene’s analysis of Albert Camus’ great novel, The Plague, reminds us “that the plague can be understood as a metaphor for people’s indifference or distancing or thoughtlessness” where we “organize people into sanitary squads to fight the plague…because everyone carries the microbe for the plague of the body, the potential for the plague of indifference”. As our species and planet respond to current unprecedented times, opportunities emerge that encourage educational shifts toward ecological sustainability. We argue that education must not be accepting of the plague of indifference because that is to be complicitous with it. As such, this paper explores opportunities to destabilize the enduring assumptions of indifference towards ecological sustainability within humanistic education, while building capacities to see beyond these assumptions. Since human subjectivity is shaped by educational agendas, we advocate for a provocative posthumanistic discourse where caring and kindness shape the future of teaching and learning within this deeply interconnected, beautiful world.

Social network plays a significant role in effective disaster management at the grassroots level. This study focuses on how the social distancing between the local leaders and ordinary citizens detangles disaster management politics in Bangladesh. Results are presented based on empirical evidence from southwest coastal Bangladesh, particularly in Dacope Upazila, applying a mixed-method approach. In January 2018, 190 respondents were interviewed based on random selection from the four villages of Sutarkhali union under Dacope Upazila, namely Nalian, Sutarkhali, Gunari, and Kalabogi. Besides, two focus group discussions (FGD), including ten respondents, and four key informant interviews (KII) were conducted purposively to know disaster politics. Results show that the socio-political distance between the local leader and ordinary citizens significantly influences getting post-disaster relief and rehabilitation supports. Those people engaged in local-level politics actively or somehow closely connected to local leaders get more relief than other people. Thus it shows that social supremacy still dominates the local decision-making processes. Much more attention needs to be placed on monitoring and evaluating relief and rehabilitation programs regularly to break such a traditional wall of ‘patron-client-relationship’ (i.e. connected or disconnected with local social-power) disaster management in the face of climate change.

In addition to health consequences, impactful life changes, and losses, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a worldwide economic emergency. Particularly, small businesses in key sectors, such as the hospitality and food industries, have incurred significant losses due to mobility restrictions, distancing requirements, and reduced service. Simultaneously, individuals have reduced their travels and visits to businesses and public places because of concerns related to the Coronavirus outbreak. In this paper, we introduce a web- and mobile- based platform dedicated to health-safety ratings and reviews. The system aims at helping businesses maintain a health-safety profile, address their customers’ expectations, and invite them to restore their habits safely.

Physical distancing is essential to help prevent the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, people often are unaware of their physical distances from each other. This study developed an autonomous system that monitors and admonishes physical distancing violators by spotting lights at them and playing a pre-recorded audio to remind them to keep their distance. It uses a downward-looking Fisheye IP camera to take a picture of the platform every 30 s. It uses Faster R-CNN with Detectron2 Library to detect people. Violators are then identified as individuals who have less than 1 m of computed Euclidean distance between other people. The environment being monitored was divided into four quadrants, each of which is lit with COB LEDs (controlled by an Arduino UNO) if they contain at least one violator. At the same time, a corresponding audio admonishment is being played through a loudspeaker. The performed single-sample t-test proves the accuracy of the Euclidean distance measurement of the system since the probability value of 0.6969, derived from the computed t-statistic of 0.3914, is significantly greater two-tailed significance level of 0.05.

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated a remarkable range of stressors that have impacted people all around the world (Cowden et al., 2021b). Those stressors have affected economic (e.g., financial security), interpersonal (e.g., social connectedness), physical (e.g., health), psychological (e.g., mental well-being), and religious/spiritual (e.g., in-person religious services) domains of human life (Blustein et al., 2020; Dein et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2020; Xiong et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). Pandemic-related stressors constitute different forms of resource loss, due in large part to the widespread community mitigation strategies (e.g., stay-at-home orders, physical distancing requirements) that have been enacted in countries and territories around the world to prevent or limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

The strong socio-spatial implications of the covid-19 pandemic and the physical distancing measures have emphasised the fundamental role played by socio-digital networks in sharing and urbanising information. Worldwide, the emergence of shared survival needs led to the self-organisation of local communities in care infrastructures for mutual aid, psychological support, sharing experiences and storytelling, often based on crowd-sourcing and crowd-mapping platforms. From the (post-)pandemic urban planning perspective, the growth of this phenomenon has implied the call for spatial research to reconsider ICTs and collaborative spatial information systems as strategic tools to support vulnerable communities and public engagement in collective matters. This contribution aims to define an open-source database to be used and implemented by citizens and social operators to provision territorial care systems and mutual aid initiatives. The adopted methodological approach proposes a citizen-led spatial information system, where updated information, perceptions and preferences can be spatialised and collected, building a crowd-sourced and sharable system of territorial knowledge, useful for collective actions and the development of sustainable and effective strategies in emergency conditions. The obtained results refer to data about mutualism in public space, collected during the pandemic period in the Ponticelli district, the eastern periphery of Naples, Italy. They are to be framed within the broader on-going European HERA research project “PuSH: Public Space in European Social Housing”. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This paper reports on the study of best practices in evaluation methodologies for aging in place technologies, and analyses their feasibility in a pandemic environment. The pandemic situation, with various physical distancing restrictions in place, especially for vulnerable older adults, has increased the importance of deploying health monitoring and social interaction technologies for aging in place. The pandemic also made it more difficult for researchers and developers of technologies to evaluate the usability of home health monitoring technologies. Existing technology evaluation methods mostly involve laboratory and home technology usability evaluations that could be problematic during physical distancing restrictions, and are not well suited for rapid evaluation of health monitoring technologies. The increasing trend in virtual doctor and health professional visits puts additional pressure to speed up innovation for home health and wellness monitoring and communication technologies without increasing risks for vulnerable populations. Researchers observed challenges with performing HCI research with older adults in a pandemic situation, including challenges with participant recruitment, obtaining informed consent for the study, shipping technology to the willing participants, assessing the ability of older adults to set up both digital health technology and remote usability tools, and research data collection. The need for low cost, low risk, easy to use and privacy-preserving usability evaluation methods and tools for home health monitoring is growing rapidly, and new remote usability evaluation methods and tools will add to the growing arsenal of digital technologies used in the public health response to COVID-19 and beyond., 7th International Conference, ITAP 2021, held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021, Virtual Event, July 24–29, 2021, Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science

This chapter begins by describing international political economy as a broad theoretical approach in human geography and the types of issues it sheds light on. In particular, we focus on its deployment in our own research fields of critical development and health geography. Turning to COVID-19, we describe how the pandemic has brought into much sharper focus the inequitable and discriminatory foundations of these systems. In particular, we outline three spaces of contagion foisted upon Central American asylum seekers and survival migrants in the time of COVID-19. These contagion spaces include detention centres constructed to ‘contain’ migrant mobility, modes of mass transportation used to funnel migrants ‘home’ following mass deportations and the ‘physical distancing’ and self-quarantining lockdowns facing these migrants as they are returned to their respective places of origin. Together, these spaces reveal the extent to which wider political economic forces have put survival migrants at an elevated and cumulative risk of catastrophe—what we regard as a death trap of discriminatory systems intended to serve dominant political and economic interests. We conclude by discussing a future political economy research agenda on COVID-19 and similar situations that might follow it, in which geographers are well positioned to offer grounded yet scalar accounts of structural violence and inequality.

The capacity for empathy emerges from the original ability to echo others—our primary capacity for identificatory resonance. Empathy may then be defined as the ability to identify with the Other for the purpose of grasping her or his subjective experience. Mature empathy requires nurturance and cultivation. Its pervasive presence is a sign of mental health. However, empathy is achieved in degrees and may be selectively exercised in different social contexts. When the ability to enter imaginatively and accurately into the subjective experience of the Other is reciprocated between two partners over time it results in strengthening their loving bond. Empathy requires balancing with compassionate, reflective distancing.

If issues of social injustice and social control needed to be made more open and explicit in the USA and UK during an era of more authoritarian leaderships, the Black Lives Matter movement supplied the impetus for exactly this need to reach the top of the political agenda. The death in the USA of the black citizen George Floyd was the catalyst for an uprising of protest marches in both countries, but also a right-wing reaction in the UK, and a distancing from the movement by President Trump in the USA.

This is a theoretical-ethnographic study of the independent work carried out by Aymara traders in the main cities of the Peruvian-Bolivian high Andean plateau (Juliaca, Puno, El Alto and La Paz), contextualized by profound local and global socioeconomic changes. Firstly, I unfold an epistemological review of the concepts by which the sociology of labour usually approaches the phenomenon of non-salaried work in Latin America, distancing myself from the notion of “informal work”. Secondly, I argue that it is the influence of Andean culture in the independent work of Aymara traders—especially reciprocity derived from a traditional agricultural-livestock economy—which sustains the social reproduction of an Aymara work ethic and habitus. Finally, I analyse how this habitus disposes Aymara traders to the deployment of social, cultural and symbolic strategies (social capital, reciprocity and Patron saint festivities, respectively), that have promoted the increasing economic success of the Aymara qamiris by pushing both traditional and modern logics, articulating economy and culture.

COVID-19 is a virus that developed in December 2019, the disease has spread around the world and there are many cases per day. The latest information reports that there are more than sixty-nine million cases of infection worldwide according to an official diagnosis. The new coronavirus pandemic has killed at least one million six peoples worldwide since its emergence, according to a report by AFP (Agence France Presse), but the actual number estimate higher, knowing that some countries are exceeded by the number of cases in hospitals and that others do not have the resources to test the majority of their population. Several treatment methods to slow down and eliminate Covid-19 exist to date. Indeed, following the appearance of the new Corona Virus, the world scientific community has carried out several research and development for eliminated the virus, there are smart masks, respirators, gels, mobile applications, vaccines that are gradually developing and much more research. However, according to studies, transmission is mainly by direct contact, including contact of uninfected hands with the face, non-compliance with distancing measures. And, according to psychologists, one of the most effective methods to fight against the Covid-19 is to prevent these frequent forget fulnesses. On the other hand, research shows that hand-to-face contact is a frequent human behavior. Hence, the main objective of this article is to propose a prevention technique through the study of an electronic device that allows users to keep their safety distance, while reminding them of the approach of a hand towards their face. It is an electronic pin featuring PIR sensors, with lenses designed to detect at distances 1.5 m. Containing a battery for power, a button, which turn on or off the pin, depending on whether you are in a bus for example or in an airport. Besides, this simple electronic component designed, pin will have suitable cost for all social categories.

Although long committed to his marriage, a father’s distancing from it as well as the writing process itself of the experience help the author understand that his straight father’s refusal to reunite the family is not unlike a queer son’s refusal to support traditional practices of marriage. Despite wanting to believe in the heteronormative family and expecting his father to remain loyal to its roles, commitments, and moral obligations, Baros himself must reject family tradition given his own sexuality. Ultimately, the author understands a father’s promise to comply with whatever it takes to be a father may not always involve free will or capture the silences in the construction and telling of family narratives. Father/son ideals, Baros finds, necessitate rethinking and renewed practices and tolerances.

Two transcribed segments from interviews with youth in care and their social workers are presented and analyzed to explicate the intersections and ruptures between youths’ experiences and professional and organizational orders. First, a young woman identifies entry into state care and the involvement of institutional workers: e.g., police, ambulance, children’s hospital, Children’s Aid Society, foster home, etc. Her life became a work site that is taken up by various institutional employees. Second, another young woman expresses her frustration and anger with her social worker. She complains, “You never come to see me unless it’s something like this”. Here she articulates her experience of tension and conflict between a desire for genuine caring and committed relations and the realities of distancing and dehumanizing institutionalized and professional practice. These segments reveal just how social workers and clients reflexively accomplish relations and selves as shaped by institutionally relevant categories and objects.

Animacy hierarchies conventionally descend from subjectivity and integrated animacy down towards insensate or dead matter. John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner upends these hierarchies, positing aestheticized inanimacy as an ideal of the moral imagination. Published as posthumanist thought begins to take shape, Stoner prefigures a distancing from the humanist view of life as an integrated and enduring tradition, described by Sloterdijk as an ‘exchange of letters’, I further argue that Stoner’s unconventional posthumanist effects are dependent upon quite conventional sexist and ableist conceptions of embodiment. The novel thus demonstrates the persistence of ideologically determined valuation criteria, and the plasticity of these criteria in new, posthumanist contexts.

This paper presents two survey studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to explore the possible uses of the desktop social robot Haru during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first study aimed to understand participants’ preferences for Haru’s use to support remote communication with others. We found, however, that participants imagined the robot playing a much larger role in their everyday life, even living as their social companion through the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19. This led us to conduct a second AMT study to further explore how participants imagined their life with Haru, and how these imaginaries related to their socio-physical distancing [SPD] practices and their perception of Haru’s use for following SPD or overcoming disruption from such distancing. Our findings present of how participants imagined Haru to help them through SPD for uses beyond remote communication and suggest how these uses map on to and extend our broader understanding of social support and companionship with robots.