International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 12, No. 5, October 2022, pp. 5501~5510 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v12i5.pp5501-5510  5501 Journal homepage: http://ijece.iaescore.com Predicting the mental health of rural Bangladeshi children in coronavirus disease 2019 Nazmun Nessa Moon 1 , Refath Ara Hossain 1 , Israt Jahan 1 , Shahriar Shakil 1 , Shihab Uddin 1 , Mahmudul Hassan 1 , Fernaz Narin Nur 2 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Notre Dame University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Jun 5, 2021 Revised May 23, 2022 Accepted Jun 18, 2022 The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) current pandemic is a worldwide health emergency like no other. It is not the only COVID-19 infection in infants, children, and adolescents that is causing concern among their families and professionals; there are also other serious issues that must be carefully detected and addressed. Major things are identified due to COVID-19, some elements are affecting children’s healthcare in direct or indirect ways, affecting them not just from a medical standpoint but also from social, psychological, economic, and educational perspectives. All these factors may have affected children’s mental development, particularly in rural settings. As Bangladesh faces a major challenge such as a lack of public mental health facilities, especially in rural areas. So, we discovered a method to predict the mental development condition of rural children that they are facing at this time of COVID-19 using machine learning technology. This research work can predict whether a rural child is mentally developed or mentally hampered in Bangladesh and this prediction gives nice feedback. Keywords: Accuracy rate Coronavirus disease 2019 Machine learning Mental health of rural children Support vector machine This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. Corresponding Author: Nazmun Nessa Moon Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University Dhaka 1207, Bangladesh Email: moon@daffodilvarsity.edu.bd 1. INTRODUCTION Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a deadly disease that causes many respiratory syndromes. On 31 st December 2019, it was the first genesis in Wuhan city, Hubei Province of China [1], [2]. COVID-19 is a fatal disease that comes from animals to humans [3]. COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone in one form or the other. Since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in China has spread rapidly to the whole world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as the global pandemic [4]. Bangladesh is also affected by this deadly virus. The first three known cases were reported on 8 March 2020 by the country’s epidemiology institute, Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) [5]. And the government of Bangladesh and private organizations have taken a few initiatives to fight against the pandemic spread of COVID-19 [6]. Since then, the pandemic has spread day by day over the whole nation. To protect the population, the government declared ‘lockdown’ throughout the nation from 23 March to 30 May and this lockdown increased later [7]. As a result, all educational institutions are also declared for vacation at this time. Children cannot cope with this situation because they face this pandemic for the first time. In normal situations, 15% of children were suffering from mental disorders. The city’s children can slightly cope up with the lockdown because they cannot play outside generally. So, they can slightly balance this situation. But in Bangladesh, the rural children cannot cope up