Although the full vaccination rate of South Korea compared to other countries, concerns about the effectiveness of the vaccine are growing as new COVID variants such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omicron appear over time. In this study, we collected Twitter data in South Korea that contained keywords like vaccines after the outbreak of the Omicron variant from 27 November 2021 to 14 February 2022. First, we analyzed the relationship between potential keywords associated with vaccination after the appearance of the Omicron variant in Twitter using network analysis. Second, we developed an efficient model for predicting the emotion of speech regarding vaccination after the COVID-19 Omicron variant pandemic by using deep learning algorithms. We constructed sentiment analysis models regarding vaccination after the COVID-19 Omicron pandemic by using five algorithms [i.e., support vector machine (SVM), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), long short-term memory models (LSTMs), bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), and Korean BERT (KoBERT)]. The results confirmed that KoBERT showed the best performance (71%) in all predictive performance indicators (accuracy, precision, and F1 score). It is necessary to prepare measures to alleviate the negative factorss of the public about vaccination in the long-term pandemic situation and help the public recognize the efficacy and safety of vaccination by using big data based on the results of this study.

The Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2020) reported that the prevalence of obesity (≥19 years old) was 31.4% in 2011, but it increased to 33.8% in 2019 and 38.3% in 2020, which confirmed that it increased rapidly after the outbreak of COVID-19. Obesity increases not only the risk of infection with COVID-19 but also severity and fatality rate after being infected with COVID-19 compared to people with normal weight or underweight. Therefore, identifying the difference in potential factors for obesity before and after the pandemic is an important issue in health science. This study identified the keywords and topics that were formed before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in the South Korean society and how they had been changing by conducting a web crawling of South Korea's news big data using “obesity” as a keyword. This study also developed models for predicting timing before and after the COVID-19 pandemic using keywords. Topic modeling results was found that the trend of keywords was different between before the COVID-19 pandemic and after the COVID-19 pandemic: topics such as “degenerative arthritis”, “diet,” and “side effects of diet treatment” were derived before the COVID-19 pandemic, while topics such as “COVID blues” and “relationship between dietary behavior and disease” were confirmed after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also showed that both RNN and LSTM had high accuracy (over 97%), but the accuracy of the RNN model (98.22%) had higher than that of the LSTM model (97.12%) by 0.24%. Based on the results of this study, it will be necessary to continuously pay attention to the newly added obesity-related factors after the COVID-19 pandemic and to prepare countermeasures at the social level based on the results of this study.

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Since workers who have experienced industrial accidents may have a physical impairment, their workload is very likely to be less than before the industrial accident. This epidemiological study identified ICF-based predictive factors affecting the work performance of South Korean workers who were economically active after undergoing medical treatment (rehabilitation) related to injuries caused by industrial accidents by using the Panel Study of Worker’s Compensation Insurance (2018–2020) as a reference. We analyzed 1383 subjects who were engaged in economic activities. The explanatory variables included participation factors, activity factors, personal factors, physical function factors, and rehabilitation service factors. The outcome variables were defined by subjective evaluations of current job performance (0 and 10 points). This study analyzed the trajectory of change in work performance and change function predictors over time by using latent growth modeling (LGM). This study found mental activity, indoor activity, occupational activity, disability grade, socioeconomic status, the length of recuperation, self-esteem, and self-efficacy as significant predictors. The results of this study suggested that it would be necessary to prepare a systematic program that considers activity factors to support the independent daily life activities and social participation of workers injured by industrial accidents.

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