Rita Orji

Omisore Olatunji, Ifeanyi Odenigbo, Joseph Orji et al.

Mental health disorders are the leading cause of health-related problems globally. It is projected that mental health disorders will be the leading cause of morbidity among adults as the incidence rates of anxiety and depression grows globally. Recently, extended reality (XR), a general term covering virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), is paving a new way to deliver mental health care. In this paper, we conduct a scoping review on the development and application of XR in the area of mental disorders. We performed a scoping database search to identify the relevant studies indexed in Google Scholar, PubMed, and the ACM Digital Library. A search period between August 2016 and December 2023 was defined to select articles related to the usage of VR, AR, and MR in a mental health context. We identified a total of 85 studies from 27 countries across the globe. By performing data analysis, we found that most of the studies focused on developed countries such as the US (16.47%) and Germany (12.94%). None of the studies were for African countries. The majority of the articles reported that XR techniques led to a significant reduction in symptoms of anxiety or depression. More studies were published in the year 2021, i.e., 31.76% (n = 31). This could indicate that mental disorder intervention received a higher attention when COVID-19 emerged. Most studies (n = 65) focused on a population between 18 and 65 years old, only a few studies focused on teenagers (n = 2). Also, more studies were done experimentally (n = 67, 78.82%) rather than by analytical and modeling approaches (n = 8, 9.41%). This shows that there is a rapid development of XR technology for mental health care. Furthermore, these studies showed that XR technology can effectively be used for evaluating mental disorders in similar or better way as the conventional approaches.

Muhammad Ahmad, Rita Orji, Fida Ullah et al.

The opioid overdose epidemic remains a critical public health crisis, particularly in the United States, leading to significant mortality and societal costs. Social media platforms like Reddit provide vast amounts of unstructured data that offer insights into public perceptions, discussions, and experiences related to opioid use. This study leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically Opioid Named Entity Recognition (ONER-2025), to extract actionable information from these platforms. Our research makes four key contributions. First, we created a unique, manually annotated dataset sourced from Reddit, where users share self-reported experiences of opioid use via different administration routes. This dataset contains 331,285 tokens and includes eight major opioid entity categories. Second, we detail our annotation process and guidelines while discussing the challenges of labeling the ONER-2025 dataset. Third, we analyze key linguistic challenges, including slang, ambiguity, fragmented sentences, and emotionally charged language, in opioid discussions. Fourth, we propose a real-time monitoring system to process streaming data from social media, healthcare records, and emergency services to identify overdose events. Using 5-fold cross-validation in 11 experiments, our system integrates machine learning, deep learning, and transformer-based language models with advanced contextual embeddings to enhance understanding. Our transformer-based models (bert-base-NER and roberta-base) achieved 97% accuracy and F1-score, outperforming baselines by 10.23% (RF=0.88).

Hamed Jelodar, Rita Orji, Stan Matwin et al.

Taking advantage of social media platforms, such as Twitter, this paper provides an effective framework for emotion detection among those who are quarantined. Early detection of emotional feelings and their trends help implement timely intervention strategies. Given the limitations of medical diagnosis of early emotional change signs during the quarantine period, artificial intelligence models provide effective mechanisms in uncovering early signs, symptoms and escalating trends. Novelty of the approach presented herein is a multitask methodological framework of text data processing, implemented as a pipeline for meaningful emotion detection and analysis, based on the Plutchik/Ekman approach to emotion detection and trend detection. We present an evaluation of the framework and a pilot system. Results of confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework for topic trends and emotion detection of COVID-19 tweets. Our findings revealed Stay-At-Home restrictions result in people expressing on twitter both negative and positive emotional semantics. Semantic trends of safety issues related to staying at home rapidly decreased within the 28 days and also negative feelings related to friends dying and quarantined life increased in some days. These findings have potential to impact public health policy decisions through monitoring trends of emotional feelings of those who are quarantined. The framework presented here has potential to assist in such monitoring by using as an online emotion detection tool kit.

Oladapo Oyebode, Chinenye Ndulue, Dinesh Mulchandani et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives in many ways. Social media data can reveal public perceptions and experience with respect to the pandemic, and also reveal factors that hamper or support efforts to curb global spread of the disease. In this paper, we analyzed COVID-19-related comments collected from six social media platforms using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. We identified relevant opinionated keyphrases and their respective sentiment polarity (negative or positive) from over 1 million randomly selected comments, and then categorized them into broader themes using thematic analysis. Our results uncover 34 negative themes out of which 17 are economic, socio-political, educational, and political issues. 20 positive themes were also identified. We discuss the negative issues and suggest interventions to tackle them based on the positive themes and research evidence.

Oladapo Oyebode, Chinenye Ndulue, Ashfaq Adib et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global health crisis that affects many aspects of human lives. In the absence of vaccines and antivirals, several behavioural change and policy initiatives, such as physical distancing, have been implemented to control the spread of the coronavirus. Social media data can reveal public perceptions toward how governments and health agencies across the globe are handling the pandemic, as well as the impact of the disease on people regardless of their geographic locations in line with various factors that hinder or facilitate the efforts to control the spread of the pandemic globally. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people globally using social media data. We apply natural language processing (NLP) and thematic analysis to understand public opinions, experiences, and issues with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic using social media data. First, we collect over 47 million COVID-19-related comments from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and three online discussion forums. Second, we perform data preprocessing which involves applying NLP techniques to clean and prepare the data for automated theme extraction. Third, we apply context-aware NLP approach to extract meaningful keyphrases or themes from over 1 million randomly selected comments, as well as compute sentiment scores for each theme and assign sentiment polarity based on the scores using lexicon-based technique. Fourth, we categorize related themes into broader themes. A total of 34 negative themes emerged, out of which 15 are health-related issues, psychosocial issues, and social issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic from the public perspective. In addition, 20 positive themes emerged from our results. Finally, we recommend interventions that can help address the negative issues based on the positive themes and other remedial ideas rooted in research.

Hamed Jelodar, Yongli Wang, Rita Orji et al.

Internet forums and public social media, such as online healthcare forums, provide a convenient channel for users (people/patients) concerned about health issues to discuss and share information with each other. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (infection from which results in the disease named COVID-19) was reported, and, due to the rapid spread of the virus in other parts of the world, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. In this paper, we used automated extraction of COVID-19 related discussions from social media and a natural language process (NLP) method based on topic modeling to uncover various issues related to COVID-19 from public opinions. Moreover, we also investigate how to use LSTM recurrent neural network for sentiment classification of COVID-19 comments. Our findings shed light on the importance of using public opinions and suitable computational techniques to understand issues surrounding COVID-19 and to guide related decision-making.