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.

IOT-Farming

Agriculture being the largest sector of Pakistan, plays an integral role in economy and food production but still lacks behind due to traditional farming approaches. IoTFarming develops a network architecture with the latest LoRaWAN technology to aid commercial/private farms. It consists of easy to use, fully autonomous and cost effective sensor nodes that measure the air temperature, relative humidity and soil moisture and communicate the data to a single-channel LoRaWAN gateway which then transmits it to the Network Server, The Things Network, making it accessible on the internet. From the Network server the data is then further transmitted onto the application server, All Things Talk. The data can be monitored visually using AllThingsTalk web page or mobile application in the form of readings, graphs and figures, making better and informed agricultural decisions, reducing water wastage and increasing yield. Also, a data log of the farm is maintained online (stored on the cloud) and offline (exported as CSV) for further data analysis and weather predictions. Furthermore, a weather data set was acquired to develop Machine Learning algorithms for rain prediction with an achieved accuracy of 77%