Background: Global efforts toward the development and deployment of a vaccine for COVID-19 are rapidly advancing. To achieve herd immunity, widespread administration of vaccines is required, which necessitates significant cooperation from the general public. As such, it is crucial that governments and public health agencies understand public sentiments toward vaccines, which can help guide educational campaigns and other targeted policy interventions.Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and apply an artificial intelligence–based approach to analyze public sentiments on social media in the United Kingdom and the United States toward COVID-19 vaccines to better understand the public attitude and concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccines.Methods: Over 300,000 social media posts related to COVID-19 vaccines were extracted, including 23,571 Facebook posts from the United Kingdom and 144,864 from the United States, along with 40,268 tweets from the United Kingdom and 98,385 from the United States from March 1 to November 22, 2020. We used natural language processing and deep learning–based techniques to predict average sentiments, sentiment trends, and topics of discussion. These factors were analyzed longitudinally and geospatially, and manual reading of randomly selected posts on points of interest helped identify underlying themes and validated insights from the analysis.Results: Overall averaged positive, negative, and neutral sentiments were at 58%, 22%, and 17% in the United Kingdom, compared to 56%, 24%, and 18% in the United States, respectively. Public optimism over vaccine development, effectiveness, and trials as well as concerns over their safety, economic viability, and corporation control were identified. We compared our findings to those of nationwide surveys in both countries and found them to correlate broadly.Conclusions: Artificial intelligence–enabled social media analysis should be considered for adoption by institutions and governments alongside surveys and other conventional methods of assessing public attitude. Such analyses could enable real-time assessment, at scale, of public confidence and trust in COVID-19 vaccines, help address the concerns of vaccine sceptics, and help develop more effective policies and communication strategies to maximize uptake.

Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition (OAHR) has recently become instrumental in the areas of pattern recognition and image processing due to its application in several fields, such as office automation and document processing. However, OAHR continues to face several challenges, including high variability of the Arabic script and its intrinsic characteristics such as cursiveness, ligatures, and diacritics, the unlimited variation in human handwriting, and the lack of large public databases. In this paper, we introduce a novel context-aware model based on deep neural networks to address the challenges of recognizing offline handwritten Arabic text, including isolated digits, characters, and words. Specifically, we propose a supervised Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that contextually extracts optimal features and employs batch normalization and dropout regularization parameters. This aims to prevent overfitting and further enhance generalization performance when compared to conventional deep learning models. We employ a number of deep stacked-convolutional layers to design the proposed Deep CNN (DCNN) architecture. The model is extensively evaluated and shown to demonstrate excellent classification accuracy when compared to conventional OAHR approaches on a diverse set of six benchmark databases, including MADBase (Digits), CMATERDB (Digits), HACDB (Characters), SUST-ALT (Digits), SUST-ALT (Characters), and SUST-ALT (Names). A further experimental study is conducted on the benchmark Arabic databases by exploiting transfer learning (TL)-based feature extraction which demonstrates the superiority of our proposed model in relation to state-of-the-art VGGNet-19 and MobileNet pre-trained models. Finally, experiments are conducted to assess comparative generalization capabilities of the models using another language database , specifically the benchmark MNIST English isolated Digits database, which further confirm the superiority of our proposed DCNN model.

The problem of Lip-reading has become an important research challenge in recent years. The goal is to recognise speech from lip movements. Most of the Lip-reading technologies developed so far are camera-based, which require video recording of the target. However, these technologies have well-known limitations of occlusion and ambient lighting with serious privacy concerns. Furthermore, vision-based technologies are not useful for multi-modal hearing aids in the coronavirus (COVID-19) environment, where face masks have become a norm. This paper aims to solve the fundamental limitations of camera-based systems by proposing a radio frequency (RF) based Lip-reading framework, having an ability to read lips under face masks. The framework employs Wi-Fi and radar technologies as enablers of RF sensing based Lip-reading. A dataset comprising of vowels A, E, I, O, U and empty (static/closed lips) is collected using both technologies, with a face mask. The collected data is used to train machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. A high classification accuracy of 95% is achieved on the Wi-Fi data utilising neural network (NN) models. Moreover, similar accuracy is achieved by VGG16 deep learning model on the collected radar-based dataset.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progress and neurodegenerative condition causing motor impairments. One of the major motor related impairments that present biggest challenge is freezing of gait (FOG) in Parkinson’s patients. In FOG episode, the patient is unable to initiate, control or sustain a gait that consequently affects the Activities of Daily Livings (ADLs) and increases the occurrence of critical events such as falls. This paper presents continuous monitoring ADLs and classification freezing of gait episodes using Wi-Fi and radar imaging. The idea is to exploit the multi-resolution scalograms generated by channel state information (CSI) imprint and micro-Doppler signatures produced by reflected radar signal. A total of 120 volunteers took part in experimental campaign and were asked to perform different activities including walking fast, walking slow, voluntary stop, sitting down & stand up and freezing of gait. Two neural networks namely Autoencoder and a proposed enhanced Autoencoder were used classify ADLs and FOG episodes using data fusion process by combining the images acquired from both sensing techniques. The Autoencoder provided overall classification accuracy of ~87% for combined datasets. The proposed algorithm provided significantly better results by presenting an overall accuracy of ~98% using data fusion..

Background: The rollout of vaccines for COVID-19 in the United Kingdom started in December 2020. Uptake has been high, and there has been a subsequent reduction in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among vaccinated individuals. However, vaccine hesitancy remains a concern, in particular relating to adverse effects following immunization (AEFIs). Social media analysis has the potential to inform policy makers about AEFIs being discussed by the public as well as public attitudes toward the national immunization campaign. Objective: We sought to assess the frequency and nature of AEFI-related mentions on social media in the United Kingdom and to provide insights on public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccines. Methods: We extracted and analyzed over 121,406 relevant Twitter and Facebook posts, from December 8, 2020, to April 30, 2021. These were thematically filtered using a 2-step approach, initially using COVID-19–related keywords and then using vaccine- and manufacturer-related keywords. We identified AEFI-related keywords and modeled their word frequency to monitor their trends over 2-week periods. We also adapted and utilized our recently developed hybrid ensemble model, which combines state-of-the-art lexicon rule–based and deep learning–based approaches, to analyze sentiment trends relating to the main vaccines available in the United Kingdom. Results: Our COVID-19 AEFI search strategy identified 46,762 unique Facebook posts by 14,346 users and 74,644 tweets (excluding retweets) by 36,446 users over the 4-month period. We identified an increasing trend in the number of mentions for each AEFI on social media over the study period. The most frequent AEFI mentions were found to be symptoms related to appetite (n=79,132, 14%), allergy (n=53,924, 9%), injection site (n=56,152, 10%), and clots (n=43,907, 8%). We also found some rarely reported AEFIs such as Bell palsy (n=11,909, 2%) and Guillain-Barre syndrome (n=9576, 2%) being discussed as frequently as more well-known side effects like headache (n=10,641, 2%), fever (n=12,707, 2%), and diarrhea (n=16,559, 3%). Overall, we found public sentiment toward vaccines and their manufacturers to be largely positive (58%), with a near equal split between negative (22%) and neutral (19%) sentiments. The sentiment trend was relatively steady over time and had minor variations, likely based on political and regulatory announcements and debates. Conclusions: The most frequently discussed COVID-19 AEFIs on social media were found to be broadly consistent with those reported in the literature and by government pharmacovigilance. We also detected potential safety signals from our analysis that have been detected elsewhere and are currently being investigated. As such, we believe our findings support the use of social media analysis to provide a complementary data source to conventional knowledge sources being used for pharmacovigilance purposes.

Background: The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 and its subsequent spread worldwide continues to be a global health crisis. Many governments consider contact tracing of citizens through apps installed on mobile phones as a key mechanism to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Objective: In this study, we sought to explore the suitability of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled social media analyses using Facebook and Twitter to understand public perceptions of COVID-19 contact tracing apps in the United Kingdom. Methods: We extracted and analyzed over 10,000 relevant social media posts across an 8-month period, from March 1 to October 31, 2020. We used an initial filter with COVID-19–related keywords, which were predefined as part of an open Twitter-based COVID-19 dataset. We then applied a second filter using contract tracing app–related keywords and a geographical filter. We developed and utilized a hybrid, rule-based ensemble model, combining state-of-the-art lexicon rule-based and deep learning–based approaches. Results: Overall, we observed 76% positive and 12% negative sentiments, with the majority of negative sentiments reported in the North of England. These sentiments varied over time, likely influenced by ongoing public debates around implementing app-based contact tracing by using a centralized model where data would be shared with the health service, compared with decentralized contact-tracing technology. Conclusions: Variations in sentiments corroborate with ongoing debates surrounding the information governance of health-related information. AI-enabled social media analysis of public attitudes in health care can help facilitate the implementation of effective public health campaigns.