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Purpose: To study the awareness on mucormycosis among outpatients who visited six tertiary eye care hospitals at Madurai, Pondicherry, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Chennai, and Tirupati. Methods: This was a telephone-based survey conducted using questionnaires consisting of 38 questions in five sections from July 5 to 25, 2021. Patients visiting the eye hospitals for an examination were contacted over their phones and responses were directly entered onto the Google forms platform. Results: A total of 4573 participants were included in the study. Among all participants, a cumulative 83% of participants had some knowledge of mucormycosis. More than 80% of them reported that their prime source of information was through mass communication like television or radio. Around 34.8% of the respondents were aware that it can occur after treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection, only half of them (54.3%) knew that systemic steroids were the main risk factor. The knowledge scores were higher for participants who were diabetics ( n = 1235) or had been affected by COVID-19 earlier ( n = 456) or whose friends had mucormycosis earlier ( n = 312). Knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) scores of nonprofessional health-care workers ( n = 103) were much better compared to patients. Conclusion: Such KAP studies give us an idea of the impact of the measures taken for educating the public. In this study, a cumulative 83% of participants had some knowledge of mucormycosis and 86% knew that this was an emergency. More than 50% of the participants were not aware that diabetes is a risk factor for mucormycosis.

Background: Displacement is often used as an indirect indicator for monitoring multiple parameters, i.e. force, velocity, acceleration, and weight, making it an important variable for the measurement and control of processes. Sensors such as Linear Variable Differential Transformers (LVDTs) play a primary role in the design of any displacement measuring instrument. Calibration of an instrument is carried out to produce accurate results from the measuring instrument. Methods: The objective of this study is to calibrate the output of LVDT by designing a signal conditioning circuit so as to extend the linearity range of the sensor to 100% of the full scale input range, and also allows the measurement technique to adapt to variations in the physical parameters of the LVDT, the supply frequency, and the temperature. An optimized neural network is trained to produce linear and adaptive output from the raw data obtained from LVDT. Optimization is achieved by choosing the best neural network algorithm, number of hidden layers and transfer function of neurons which produce the least mean square error. The optimized neural network algorithm is implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip for testing and validation in real life. Results: Experimental results show that the proposed technique was able to extend the linearity of LVDT and make the output adaptive for variations in physical parameters of LVDT, supply frequency and temperature. Conclusions: Accurate measurement of displacement is essential in many process applications, and a good calibration technique is required to produce accurate measurement. The presented calibration technique using optimized neural network algorithms has produced reliable measurements as desired.

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