Social distancing measures are proposed as the primary strategy to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, identifying situations where these protocols are violated has implications for curtailing the spread of the disease and promoting a sustainable lifestyle. This paper proposes a novel computer vision-based system to analyze CCTV footage to provide a threat level assessment of COVID-19 spread. The system strives to holistically interpret the information in CCTV footage spanning multiple frames to recognize instances of various violations of social distancing protocols, across time and space, as well as identification of group behaviors. This functionality is achieved primarily by utilizing a temporal graph-based structure to represent the information of the CCTV footage and a strategy to holistically interpret the graph and quantify the threat level of the given scene. The individual components are evaluated in a range of scenarios, and the complete system is tested against human expert opinion. The results reflect the dependence of the threat level on people, their physical proximity, interactions, protective clothing, and group dynamics, with a system performance of 76% accuracy.
Assessing the health of both the fetus and mother is vital in preventing and identifying possible complications in pregnancy. This paper focuses on a device that can be used effectively by the mother herself with minimal supervision and provide a reasonable estimation of fetal and maternal health while being safe, comfortable, and easy to use. The device proposed uses a belt with a single accelerometer over the mother's uterus to record the required information. The device is expected to monitor both the mother and the fetus constantly over a long period and provide medical professionals with useful information, which they would otherwise overlook due to the low frequency that health monitoring is carried out at the present. The paper shows that simultaneous measurement of respiratory information of the mother and fetal movement is in fact possible even in the presence of mild interferences, which needs to be accounted for if the device is expected to be worn for extended times.
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