Impact of Covid-19 on people and Work from Home

This pandemic has affected family life around the world. As a result of lockdown individuals are already experiencing significant revenue and job losses. The ability to ‘Work from Home’ (WFH) can help damp down the impact of the situation, undoubtedly. Overall, the effects of WFH arrangements rely a lot on the job status of parents and presence of dependents (children & elderly), and this current situation is likely to intensify these differences. It does not necessarily mean, however, that the effect of the crisis should inevitably be gender neutral. Working women have been particularly affected. It seems to be very fascinating to work from home, while sitting on a comfortable couch, casually dressed, even sometimes in sleep suits, without stepping out in scorching heat and wasting time in traveling, but this may not be a preferred situation for everybody, especially women. The most significant impact on working women during the crisis will be trying to balance household demands, childcare needs and work demands. The group most likely to be hardest hit then would be lower income families with young children, and single mothers in particular. Generally women are in charge of planning, organizing and recalling of everything that needs to be remembered. The mental stress and load that comes with such work has risen exponentially in present circumstances. Even though many countries are relied on lockdown to control widespread of COVID-19 pandemic, the mental problems such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, suicidal thoughts and other psychological trauma are most common in case of normal individual and extensive in case of people who are psychologically ill. Females are more prone to psychological distress. The main concern is to manage and provide opportunities for regulation of stress caused due to anxiety and lack of peer contact. Another main threat is an increased risk of parents to develop mental illness, women may also suffer from domestic violence and consequently it results child maltreatment. The current scenario may be particularly challenging especially for children and adolescents with special needs or disadvantages, such as disabilities, also if someone has prior trauma experiences, undiagnosed mental health problems, background of migration and low socioeconomic status.

Tunable Metamaterials

Metamaterials (MTM) are composite materials that provide some unique characteristics which are not available by nature. But there is one major drawback or limitation of MTM which is its fixed and narrow working frequency region. To overcome this limitation, there are few techniques, presented in this thesis, to vary the working frequency band of MTM. As MTM are artificial materials, so there are various resonators available in literature, presented for MTM. In this thesis, three resonators, split ring resonator (SRR), S-shaped resonator (SSR) and single side paired S-ring resonator (SSPSRR) have been chosen from literature and different techniques to shift their resonant frequencies are presented. For SRR, a tunable case i.e., inner ring shorted split ring resonator (IRS-SRR) is pre- sented in this thesis. The analytical expression of the effective permeability of IRS-SRR is calculated and for the verification of the analytical work, the experimental results are also included in this thesis. The analytical expression for the effective permeability of SSR is also presented in this thesis. Two tunable or modified cases of SSR, i.e., bottom metallic strips shorted S-shaped resonator (BSSR) and top-bottom metallic strips shorted S-shaped resonator (TBSSR) are presented in this thesis. The analytical expressions of the effective permeabilities of BSSR and TBSSR are also calculated. For verification of the analytical work of SSR, BSSR and TBSSR, experimental results are included in this thesis. Similar to SSR, the analytical expression of the effective permeability of SSPSRR is presented in this thesis and the experimental results are also included to verify the analytical work. Two tunable cases of SSPSRR, i.e., bottom metallic strips shorted single side paired S- ring resonator (B-SSPSRR) and top-bottom metallic strips shorted single side paired S-ring resonator (TB-SSPSRR), are also presented in this thesis along with experimental results. Other than the tunable cases of various resonators, rotation of resonators is presented in this thesis as a technique to vary the working frequency of MTM. This technique has been applied on SSR, SSPSRR and their respective tunable cases in this thesis and the vexperimental results are presented for justification of this technique. There are number of devices (made using MTM), are available in literature. All these devices can be upgraded to work as tunable devices using the techniques presented in this thesis.