Misinformation such as on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) drugs, vaccination or presentation of its treatment from untrusted sources have shown dramatic consequences on public health. Authorities have deployed several surveillance tools to detect and slow down the rapid misinformation spread online. Large quantities of unverified information are available online and at present there is no real-time tool available to alert a user about false information during online health inquiries over a web search engine. To bridge this gap, we propose a web search engine misinformation notifier extension (SEMiNExt). Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithm have been successfully integrated into the extension. This enables SEMiNExt to read the user query from the search bar, classify the veracity of the query and notify the authenticity of the query to the user, all in real-time to prevent the spread of misinformation. Our results show that SEMiNExt under artificial neural network (ANN) works best with an accuracy of 93%, F1-score of 92%, precision of 92% and a recall of 93% when 80% of the data is trained. Moreover, ANN is able to predict with a very high accuracy even for a small training data size. This is very important for an early detection of new misinformation from a small data sample available online that can significantly reduce the spread of misinformation and maximize public health safety. The SEMiNExt approach has introduced the possibility to improve online health management system by showing misinformation notifications in real-time, enabling safer web-based searching on health-related issues.

The coronavirus pandemic overwhelmed many countries and their healthcare systems. Shortage of testing kits and Intensive-Care-Unit (ICU) beds for critical patients have become a norm in most developing countries. This has prompted the need to rapidly identify the COVID-19 patients to stop the spread of the virus and also to find critical patients. The latter is imperative for determining the state of critically ill patients as quickly as possible. This will lower the number of deaths from the infection. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based smartphone application for the early prognosis of COVID-19 infected patients and also predict their mortality risk using their symptoms. Moreover, we heuristically identified the most important symptoms necessary for making such predictions. We have successfully reduced the number of features by almost half for the prognosis and by more than a third for forecasting the mortality risk, compared to the contemporary studies. The application makes the real-time analysis using machine learning models, designed and stored in the cloud. Our machine learning model demonstrates an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 97.72%, 100%, 95.55%, and 97.70%, respectively, in identifying the COVID-19 infected patients and with an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 90.83%, 88.47%, 92.94%, and 90.65%, respectively, in forecasting the mortality risk from the infection. The real-time cloud-based approach yields faster responses, which is critical in the time of pandemic for mitigating the infection spread and aiding in the efficient management of the limited ICU resources.

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