During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, different technologies, including telehealth, are maximised to mitigate the risks and consequences of the disease. Telehealth has been widely utilised because of its usability and safety in providing healthcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a systematic literature review which provides extensive evidence on the impact of COVID-19 through telehealth and which covers multiple directions in a large-scale research remains lacking. This study aims to review telehealth literature comprehensively since the pandemic started. It also aims to map the research landscape into a coherent taxonomy and characterise this emerging field in terms of motivations, open challenges and recommendations. Articles related to telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic were systematically searched in the WOS, IEEE, Science Direct, Springer and Scopus databases. The final set included (n=86) articles discussing telehealth applications with respect to (i) control (n=25), (ii) technology (n=14) and (iii) medical procedure (n=47). Since the beginning of the pandemic, telehealth has been presented in diverse cases. However, it still warrants further attention. Regardless of category, the articles focused on the challenges which hinder the maximisation of telehealth in such times and how to address them. With the rapid increase in the utilization of telehealth in different specialised hospitals and clinics, a potential framework which reflects the authors’ implications of the future application and opportunities of telehealth has been established. This article improves our understanding and reveals the full potential of telehealth during these difficult times and beyond.

This paper proposes a smart real-time health monitoring structured for hospitals' distributor based on wearable health data sensors. Health data were received from multiple heterogeneous wearable sensors, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), oxygen saturation sensor (SpO2), blood pressure monitor, and non-sensory measurement (text frame), from 500 patients with different symptoms. Triage level and healthcare services were identified based on the new four-level remote triage and package localization (4LRTPL). The numbers of healthcare services that represent hospital status were collected from 12 hospitals located in Baghdad city. This study constructed a decision matrix based on the crossover of ''multi-healthcare services'' and ''hospital list'' within Tier 4. The hospitals were then ranked using multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques, namely, integrated analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and vlsekriterijumskaoptimizacija i kompromisnoresenje (VIKOR). Mean ± standard deviation was computed to ensure that the hospital ranking undergoes systematic ranking for objective validation. This research provided scenarios and checklist benchmarking to evaluate the proposed and existing health recommender frameworks. Results corroborated that: 1) the integration of AHP and VIKOR effectively solved hospital selection problems; 2) in the objective validation, significant differences were recognized between the scores of groups, indicating that the ranking results were identical; 3) in evaluation, the proposed framework exhibited an advantage over the benchmark framework with a percentage of 56.25%; and 4) hospitals with multiple healthcare services received the highest ranks, whereas hospitals with fewer healthcare services received low ranks.INDEX TERMS Real-time remote monitoring, hospital management, hospital selection, chronic heart, healthcare services, triage, wearable health sensor.

Ranking the strengths and weaknesses of software engineering students in software development life cycle (SDLC) process level is a challenging task owing to (1) data variation, (2) multievaluation criteria, (3) criterion importance and (4) alternative member importance. According to the existing literature, no specified procedure can rank the ability of software engineering students based on SDLC process levels to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each student. This study aims to present a novel triplex procedure for ranking the ability of software engineering students to address the literature gap. The methodology of the proposed work is presented on the basis of three phases. In the identification phase, four steps are implemented, namely, processing dataset, identifying the criteria, distributing the courses to the software engineering body of knowledge and proposing the pre-decision matrix (DM). The data comprise the GPA and soft skills from 60 software engineering students who graduated from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris in 2016. In the pre-processing phase, three steps are involved as follows. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is first used to assign weights to the courses and then multiply the assigned weight by courses, which is the first procedure in the proposed work. In this phase, the construction of DM is presented based on multimeasurement criteria (GPA and soft skills), with SDLC process levels as alternatives. In the development phase, AHP is used again to weight the multimeasurement criteria, and this is the second procedure. In such case, the coordinator and head of the software engineering department are consulted to obtain subjective judgments for each criterion. Technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is then used to rank the students, which is the third procedure. In the validation, statistical analysis is performed to validate the results by checking the accuracy of the systematic ranking. Results show that (1) integrating AHP and group TOPSIS is suitable for ranking the ability of students. (2) The 60 students are categorized into five ranking groups based on their strength level: 14 collector requirements, 13 designers, 5 programmers, 13 testers and 15 maintenances. (3) Significant differences are observed between the groups’ scores for each level of SDLC, indicating that the ranking results are identical for all levels.

The selection of software programmer applicants based on multiperspective evaluation criteria (grade point average (GPA) and soft skills of the applicants) is needed instead of an interview because an interview does not necessarily lead to hiring the best candidate amongst the applicants. The selection of a suitable software programmer is considered a challenging task owing to the following factors: (1) data variation, (2) multiple evaluation criteria and (3) criterion importance. A general framework for the selection of the best software programmer applicants is not available in the existing literature. The present study aims to propose a novel multiperspective hiring framework based on multicriteria analysis to select the best software programmer amongst several applicants. A decision matrix (DM) is constructed for the selection of the best programmer applicants according to multiple criteria, namely, structured programming, object-oriented programming, data structure, database system and courseware engineering. Each criterion includes two parameters, namely, GPA and soft skills, and these criteria cross over with programmer applicants as alternatives. The standard and expert opinion of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge is used to distribute the criteria in the DM. The two commonly used techniques of multicriteria decision-making are analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for weighing the criteria and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for ranking the alternatives (programmer applicants). The data used in this study include 60 software engineering students who graduated in 2016 from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. Results show that integrating multilayer analytic hierarchy process (MLAHP) and group TOPSIS are effective for solving applicant selection problems. Group TOPSIS uses different contexts — internal and external aggregation — and indicates similar results. Objective validation is used for the ranking of the results, which are equally divided into four parts. Furthermore, the applicants are systematically ranked. This study benefits application software, system software and computer programming tool companies by providing a method that improves software quality whilst reducing time and cost in the selection process.

When COVID-19 spread in China in December 2019, thousands of studies have focused on this pandemic. Each presents a unique perspective that reflects the pandemic’s main scientific disciplines. For example, social scientists are concerned with reducing the psychological impact on the human mental state especially during lockdown periods. Computer scientists focus on establishing fast and accurate computerized tools to assist in diagnosing, preventing, and recovering from the disease. Medical scientists and doctors, or the frontliners, are the main heroes who received, treated, and worked with the millions of cases at the expense of their own health. Some of them have continued to work even at the expense of their lives. All these studies enforce the multidisciplinary work where scientists from different academic disciplines (social, environmental, technological, etc.) join forces to produce research for beneficial outcomes during the crisis. One of the many branches is computer science along with its various technologies, including artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, decision support systems (DSS), and many more. Among the most notable DSS utilization is those related to multicriterion decision making (MCDM), which is applied in various applications and across many contexts, including business, social, technological and medical. Owing to its importance in developing proper decision regimens and prevention strategies with precise judgment, it is deemed a noteworthy topic of extensive exploration, especially in the context of COVID-19-related medical applications. The present study is a comprehensive review of COVID-19-related medical case studies with MCDM using a systematic review protocol. PRISMA methodology is utilized to obtain a final set of (n = 35) articles from four major scientific databases (ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science). The final set of articles is categorized into taxonomy comprising five groups: (1) diagnosis (n = 6), (2) safety (n = 11), (3) hospital (n = 8), (4) treatment (n = 4), and (5) review (n = 3). A bibliographic analysis is also presented on the basis of annual scientific production, country scientific production, co-occurrence, and co-authorship. A comprehensive discussion is also presented to discuss the main challenges, motivations, and recommendations in using MCDM research in COVID‐19-related medial case studies. Lastly, we identify critical research gaps with their corresponding solutions and detailed methodologies to serve as a guide for future directions. In conclusion, MCDM can be utilized in the medical field effectively to optimize the resources and make the best choices particularly during pandemics and natural disasters.