Background: Public health recommendations and governmental measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in numerous restrictions on daily living including social distancing, isolation and home confinement. While these measures are imperative to abate the spreading of COVID-19, the impact of these restrictions on health behaviours and lifestyles at home is undefined. Therefore, an international online survey was launched in April 2020, in seven languages, to elucidate the behavioural and lifestyle consequences of COVID-19 restrictions. This report presents the results from the first thousand responders on physical activity (PA) and nutrition behaviours. Methods: Following a structured review of the literature, the “Effects of home Confinement on multiple Lifestyle Behaviours during the COVID-19 outbreak (ECLB-COVID19)” Electronic survey was designed by a steering group of multidisciplinary scientists and academics. The survey was uploaded and shared on the Google online survey platform. Thirty-five research organisations from Europe, North-Africa, Western Asia and the Americas promoted the survey in English, German, French, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Slovenian languages. Questions were presented in a differential format, with questions related to responses “before” and “during” confinement conditions. Results: 1047 replies (54% women) from Asia (36%), Africa (40%), Europe (21%) and other (3%) were included in the analysis. The COVID-19 home confinement had a negative effect on all PA intensity levels (vigorous, moderate, walking and overall). Additionally, daily sitting time increased from 5 to 8 h per day. Food consumption and meal patterns (the type of food, eating out of control, snacks between meals, number of main meals) were more unhealthy during confinement, with only alcohol binge drinking decreasing significantly. Conclusion: While isolation is a necessary measure to protect public health, results indicate that it alters physical activity and eating behaviours in a health compromising direction. A more detailed analysis of survey data will allow for a segregation of these responses in different age groups, countries and other subgroups, which will help develop interventions to mitigate the negative lifestyle behaviours that have manifested during the COVID-19 confinement.

On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization announced a new coronavirus, which later turned out to be very dangerous. Since that date, COVID-19 has spread to become a pandemic that has now affected practically all regions in the world. Since then, many researchers in medicine have contributed to fighting COVID-19. In this context and given the great growth of scientific publications related to this global pandemic, manual text and data retrieval has become a challenging task. To remedy this challenge, we are proposing CovBERT, a pre-trained language model based on the BERT model to automate the literature review process. CovBERT relies on prior training on a large corpus of scientific publications in the biomedical domain and related to COVID-19 to increase its performance on the literature review task. We evaluate CovBERT on the classification of short text based on our scientific dataset of biomedical articles on COVID-19 entitled COV-Dat-20. We demonstrate statistically significant improvements by using BERT.

One important type of testing Web services compositions is load testing, as such applications solicit concurrent access by multiple users simultaneously. In this context, load testing of these applications seems an important task in order to detect problems under elevated loads. For this purpose, we propose a distributed and resource aware test architecture aiming to study the behavior of WS-BPEL compositions considering load conditions. The major contribution of this paper consists of (i) looking for the best node hosting the execution of each tester instance, then (ii) running a load test during which the composition under test is monitored and performance data are recorded and finally (iii) analyzing in a distributed manner the resulting test logs in order to identify problems under load. We also illustrate our approach by means of a case study in the healthcare domain considering the context of resource aware load testing.

In this paper, we present a convolutional gated recurrent neural network (CGRNN) to predict epileptic seizures based on features extracted from EEG data that represent the temporal aspect and the frequency aspect of the signal. Using a dataset collected in the Children’s Hospital of Boston, CGRNN can predict epileptic seizures between 35 min and 5 min in advance. Our experimental results indicate that the performance of CGRNN varies between patients. We achieve an average sensitivity of 89% and a mean accuracy of 75.6% for the patients in the data set, with a mean False Positive Rate (FPR) of 1.6 per hour.