BACKGROUND: SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is considered a highly infectious and life threatening disease. OBJECTIVE: The present paper aims to evaluate various aspects of preventive measures and clinical management of the scheduled visits for orthodontic patients to the dental clinics during the outbreak of COVID-19, and to assess how orthodontists dealt with this challenge. METHODS: Orthodontists in private and public clinics were invited to fill a questionnaire that addressed infection control protocols and concerns about clinical management of patients in the clinics during the pandemic. Frequncies and percentages of the responses were obtained and compared using Chi-square tests. RESULTS: About 77% of those working in private clinics, and 63% of those working in private and governmental clinics performed room disinfection following each patient. In case of patients needing urgent management and have active infection, 56% of the participants provided care under high infection control measures; on the contrary, 64% provided symptomatic intervention including orthodontic wax, analgesics and sometimes mouthwash. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the orthodontic treatments. All pre-cautionary measures have to be made available in the clinic in order to minimize the spread of viral infection with continuous dental health care training.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) with centralized control provides a global view and achieves efficient network resources management. However, using centralized controllers has several limitations related to scalability and performance, especially with the exponential growth of 5G communication. This paper proposes a novel traffic scheduling algorithm to avoid congestion in the control plane. The Packet-In messages received from different 5G devices are classified into two classes: critical and non-critical 5G communication by adopting Dual-Spike Neural Networks (DSNN) classifier and implementing it on a Virtualized Network Function (VNF). Dual spikes identify each class to increase the reliability of the classification
... Show MoreThe virtual decomposition control (VDC) is an efficient tool suitable to deal with the full-dynamics-based control problem of complex robots. However, the regressor-based adaptive control used by VDC to control every subsystem and to estimate the unknown parameters demands specific knowledge about the system physics. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on reorganizing the equation of the VDC for a serial chain manipulator using the adaptive function approximation technique (FAT) without needing specific system physics. The dynamic matrices of the dynamic equation of every subsystem (e.g. link and joint) are approximated by orthogonal functions due to the minimum approximation errors produced. The contr
This article presents a new cascaded extended state observer (CESO)-based sliding-mode control (SMC) for an underactuated flexible joint robot (FJR). The control of the FJR has many challenges, including coupling, underactuation, nonlinearity, uncertainties and external disturbances, and the noise amplification especially in the high-order systems. The proposed control integrates the CESO and SMC, in which the CESO estimates the states and disturbances, and the SMC provides the system robustness to the uncertainty and disturbance estimation errors. First, a dynamic model of the FJR is derived and converted from an underactuated form to a canonical form via the Olfati transformation and a flatness approach, which reduces the complexity of th
... Show MoreResearchers dream of developing autonomous humanoid robots which behave/walk like a human being. Biped robots, although complex, have the greatest potential for use in human-centred environments such as the home or office. Studying biped robots is also important for understanding human locomotion and improving control strategies for prosthetic and orthotic limbs. Control systems of humans walking in cluttered environments are complex, however, and may involve multiple local controllers and commands from the cerebellum. Although biped robots have been of interest over the last four decades, no unified stability/balance criterion adopted for stabilization of miscellaneous walking/running modes of biped
As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord
... Show MoreCrises affect the economic growth of the country in general and the banking sector in particular. Given the importance of this sector, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of banks from time to time and monitor the liquidity of each bank and how to organize its management to overcome any crisis or emergency situation that may befall it. The research seeks to diagnose the level of impact of crisis management. In the liquidity of Iraqi private banks, using liquidity indicators, as the research community represents the banks listed in the Iraq Stock Exchange As for the research sample, it is represented by (10) pri
... Show MoreIn this research we have tackled the role of Talent management (as a private variable) within (the Talent attraction, the Talent management performance, Talent development and Talent retention) on strategic performance reinforcement ( accredited variable) within its dimensions ( financial perspective, costumer perspective, internal operations perspective and learning and development perspective). The research conducted on sample of some college teachers from two of Sumer's colleges. The research problem represented by the broad organization's competition as well as universities; which led these colleges to investigate it's skillful human staff to meet it's strategic performance.
To meet the aims of
... Show MoreAbstract:- Cyberspace is a new arena for conflict between international powers, especially since the cost of cyber-conflict is less than its traditional warfare counterparts regardless of the nature of the weapons used, whether traditional or non-traditional. Cyber conflict is necessarily based on strategies to deter, attack, and defend. The aim of the cybercrime conflict is to ensure the defensive sufficiency of the state, ensuring its national security and safeguarding its supreme interests. Despite Japan-China relations characterized by convergence and cooperation in post-Cold War economic spheres, Japan continues to retain the growing Chinese influence in East Asia. These variables prompted Japan to announce a hedging strategy due to un
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