Impact of COVID-19 on Multiple Sclerosis Topic Discussion on Twitter.

INTRODUCTION: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the world's most common neurologic disorders. Social media have been proposed as a way to maintain and even increase social interaction for people with MS. The objective of this work is to identify and compare the topics on Twitter during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Data was collected using the Twitter API between 9/2/2019 and 13/5/2020. SentiStrength was used to analyze data with the day that the pandemic was declared used as a turning point. Frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used for each unigram and calculated the gains in tf-idf value. A comparative analysis of the relevance of words and categories among the datasets was performed. RESULTS: The original dataset contained over 610k tweets, our final dataset had 147,963 tweets. After the 10th of march some categories gained relevance in positive tweets ("Healthcare professional", "Chronic conditions", "Condition burden"), while in negative tweets "Emotional aspects" became more relevant and "COVID-19" emerged as a new topic. CONCLUSIONS: Our work provides insight on how COVID-19 has changed the online discourse of people with MS.

Review of wireless sensors networks in health applications.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming increasingly important for telemedicine applications, monitoring patients both in the clinical setting and at home. They reduce user discomfort, enhance mobility and reduce costs. WSN are also fundamental in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) since these smart systems, which are tailored to users needs, collect information about users and their ambient in order to provide personalized feedback. Despite the growing use of wireless communications in the health domain and in AAL systems there is a lack of research literature reviewing trials of these technologies. This paper provides a systematic review of the use of WSN in the health domain, presenting current WSN implementations. It covers 126 papers, of which 26 are studies, classified according to inclusion criteria. There is presented a discussion about the recent research conducted in the field.