A Lightweight and Robust Secure Key Establishment Protocol for Internet of Medical Things in COVID-19 Patients Care

Internet of medical things and blockchain-enabled patient-centric agent through SDN for remote patient monitoring in 5G network

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant increase in the use of internet resources for accessing medical care, resulting in the development and advancement of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). This technology utilizes a range of medical equipment and testing software to broadcast patient results over the internet, hence enabling the provision of remote healthcare services. Nevertheless, the preservation of privacy and security in the realm of online communication continues to provide a significant and pressing obstacle. Blockchain technology has shown the potential to mitigate security apprehensions across several sectors, such as the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in research have included intelligent agents in patient monitoring systems by integrating blockchain technology. However, the conventional network configuration of the agent and blockchain introduces a level of complexity. In order to address this disparity, we present a proposed architectural framework that combines software defined networking (SDN) with Blockchain technology. This framework is specially tailored for the purpose of facilitating remote patient monitoring systems within the context of a 5G environment. The architectural design contains a patient-centric agent (PCA) inside the SDN control plane for the purpose of managing user data on behalf of the patients. The appropriate handling of patient data is ensured by the PCA via the provision of essential instructions to the forwarding devices. The suggested model is assessed using hyperledger fabric on docker-engine, and its performance is compared to that of current models in fifth generation (5G) networks. The performance of our suggested model surpasses current methodologies, as shown by our extensive study including factors such as throughput, dependability, communication overhead, and packet error rate.

A Rivest-Shamir-Adleman-Based Robust and Effective Three-Factor User Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Use in Wireless Body Area Networks

In healthcare, wireless body area networks (WBANs) can be used to constantly collect patient body data and assist in real-time medical services for patients from physicians. In such security- and privacy-critical systems, the user authentication mechanism can be fundamentally expected to prevent illegal access and privacy leakage occurrences issued by hacker intrusion. Currently, a significant quantity of new WBAN-oriented authentication protocols have been designed to verify user identity and ensure that body data are accessed only with a session key. However, those newly published protocols still unavoidably affect session key security and user privacy due to the lack of forward secrecy, mutual authentication, user anonymity, etc. To solve this problem, this paper designs a robust user authentication protocol. By checking the integrity of the message sent by the other party, the communication entity verifies the other party's identity validity. Compared with existing protocols, the presented protocol enhances security and privacy while maintaining the efficiency of computation.

A novel authentication protocol to ensure confidentiality among the Internet of Medical Things in covid-19 and future pandemic scenario

Diagnosing the patients remotely, controlling the medical equipment, and monitoring the quarantined patients are some of the necessary and frequent activities in COVID-19. Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) makes this works easy and feasible. Sharing information from patients and sensors associated with the patients to doctors is always an integral part of IoMT. Unauthorized access to such information may invite adversaries to disturb patients financially and mentally; furthermore, leaks in its confidentiality will lead to dangerous health concerns for patients. While ensuring authentication and confidentiality, We must focus on the constraints of IoMT, such as low energy consumption, deficient memory, and the dynamic nature of devices. Numerous protocols have been proposed for authentication in healthcare systems such as IoMT and telemedicine. However, many of these protocols were neither computationally efficient nor provided confidentiality, anonymity, and resistance against several attacks. In the proposed protocol, we have considered the most common scenario of IoMT and tried to overcome the limitations of existing works. Describing the system module and security analysis proves it is a panacea for COVID-19 and future pandemics.

A Novel Optimized Perturbation-Based Machine Learning for Preserving Privacy in Medical Data

In recent times, providing privacy to the medical dataset has been the biggest issue in medical applications. Since, in hospitals, the patient's data are stored in files, the files must be secured properly. Thus, different machine learning models were developed to overcome data privacy issues. But, those models faced some problems in providing privacy to medical data. Therefore, a novel model named Honey pot-based Modular Neural System (HbMNS) was designed in this paper. Here, the performance of the proposed design is validated with disease classification. Also, the perturbation function and the verification module are incorporated into the designed HbMNS model to provide data privacy. The presented model is implemented in a python environment. Moreover, the system outcomes are estimated before and after fixing the perturbation function. A DoS attack is launched in the system to validate the method. At last, a comparative assessment is made between executed models with other models. From the comparison, it is verified that the presented model achieved better outcomes than others.

Secure data authentication and access control protocol for industrial healthcare system

Because of recent COVID-19 epidemic, the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) has acquired a significant impetus to diagnose patients remotely, regulate medical equipment, and track quarantined patients via smart electronic devices installed at the patient's end. Nevertheless, the IoMT confronts various security and privacy issues, such as entity authentication, confidentiality, and integrity of health-related data, among others, rendering this technology vulnerable to different attacks. To address these concerns, a number of security procedures based on traditional cryptographic approaches, such as discrete logarithm and integer factorization problems, have been developed. All of these protocols, however, are vulnerable to quantum attacks. This paper, in this context, presents a data authentication and access control protocol for IoMT systems that can withstand quantum attacks. A comprehensive formal security assessment demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can endure both current and future threats. In terms of data computing, transmission, and key storage overheads, it also surpasses other related techniques.

Detection of COVID-19 Case from Chest CT Images Using Deformable Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The infectious coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a great threat to global human health. Timely and rapid detection of COVID-19 cases is very crucial to control its spreading through isolation measures as well as for proper treatment. Though the real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test is a widely used technique for COVID-19 infection, recent researches suggest chest computed tomography (CT)-based screening as an effective substitute in cases of time and availability limitations of RT-PCR. In consequence, deep learning-based COVID-19 detection from chest CT images is gaining momentum. Furthermore, visual analysis of data has enhanced the opportunities of maximizing the prediction performance in this big data and deep learning realm. In this article, we have proposed two separate deformable deep networks converting from the conventional convolutional neural network (CNN) and the state-of-the-art ResNet-50, to detect COVID-19 cases from chest CT images. The impact of the deformable concept has been observed through performance comparative analysis among the designed deformable and normal models, and it is found that the deformable models show better prediction results than their normal form. Furthermore, the proposed deformable ResNet-50 model shows better performance than the proposed deformable CNN model. The gradient class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) technique has been used to visualize and check the targeted regions' localization effort at the final convolutional layer and has been found excellent. Total 2481 chest CT images have been used to evaluate the performance of the proposed models with a train-valid-test data splitting ratio of 80 : 10 : 10 in random fashion. The proposed deformable ResNet-50 model achieved training accuracy of 99.5% and test accuracy of 97.6% with specificity of 98.5% and sensitivity of 96.5% which are satisfactory compared with related works. The comprehensive discussion demonstrates that the proposed deformable ResNet-50 model-based COVID-19 detection technique can be useful for clinical applications.

A survey on big data-enabled innovative online education systems during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the spread of COVID-19 around the world, the education industry faces enormous challenges. Some colleges and universities have launched online teaching. Comprehensive online teaching and student health checkups help students complete the set teaching content and return to school as soon as possible. With the development of big data, combined with the epidemic risk we are facing, the rational use of big data and the internet for innovative online education has become a mainstream teaching method. Colleges and universities are not yet familiar with the development prospects and future of online education. Through the research of this paper, we can understand the combination of online education and the development of big data and promote its application in colleges and universities. Not only have innovative online education platforms such as MOOC and DingTalk been widely used, but innovative online education methods such as virtual classrooms also have been created. Based on the current epidemic background, this paper analyzes the development of online education, introduces the impact of the combination of online education and big data, and introduces innovative online education technologies and their effects. It helps online education under the influence of the new coronavirus epidemic, operating big data technology to analyze the current prospects and development of online education, showing the combination of big data technology and online education through the analysis of big data technology, and ending with more expectations on other aspects of the use of big data, which affects the online education industry as well as other industries. Finally, we summarize the combination of big data and innovative online education since the emergence of COVID-19 and introduce the concepts and methods of combining online education and big data technology in detail. The online education platform also makes a reasonable introduction. The thesis can be used to understand the problems and challenges faced by innovative online education in the context of the new coronavirus epidemic and look forward to the future on this basis.

COVID-19 pandemic and unemployment rate prediction for developing countries of Asia: A hybrid approach

Unemployment is an essential problem for developing countries, which has a direct and major role in economy of a country. Understanding the pattrens of unemployment rate is critical now a days and has drawn attention of researcher from all fields of study across the globe. As unemployment plays an important role in the planning of a country's monetary progress for policymakers and researcher. Determining the unemployment rate efficiently required an advance modeling approach. Recently,numerous studies have relied on traditional testing methods to estimate the unemployment rate. Unemployment is usually nonstationary in nature. As a result, demonstrating them using traditional methods will lead to unpredictable results. It needs a hybrid approach to deal with the prediction of unemployment rate in order to deal with the issue associated with traditional techniques. This research primary goal is to examine the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the unemployment rate in selected countries of Asia through advanced hybrid modeling approach, using unemployment data of seven developing countries of Asian: Iran, Sri Lanka; Bangladesh; Pakistan; Indonesia; China; and India,and compare the results with conventional modeling approaches. Finding shows that the hybrid ARIMA-ARNN model outperformed over its competitors for Asia developing economies. In addition, the best fitted model was utilised to predict five years ahead unemployment rate. According to the findings, unemployment will rise significantly in developing economies in the next years, and this will have a particularly severe impact on the region's economies that aren't yet developed.

A Novel QKD Approach to Enhance IIOT Privacy and Computational Knacks

The industry-based internet of things (IIoT) describes how IIoT devices enhance and extend their capabilities for production amenities, security, and efficacy. IIoT establishes an enterprise-to-enterprise setup that means industries have several factories and manufacturing units that are dependent on other sectors for their services and products. In this context, individual industries need to share their information with other external sectors in a shared environment which may not be secure. The capability to examine and inspect such large-scale information and perform analytical protection over the large volumes of personal and organizational information demands authentication and confidentiality so that the total data are not endangered after illegal access by hackers and other unauthorized persons. In parallel, these large volumes of confidential industrial data need to be processed within reasonable time for effective deliverables. Currently, there are many mathematical-based symmetric and asymmetric key cryptographic approaches and identity- and attribute-based public key cryptographic approaches that exist to address the abovementioned concerns and limitations such as computational overheads and taking more time for crucial generation as part of the encipherment and decipherment process for large-scale data privacy and security. In addition, the required key for the encipherment and decipherment process may be generated by a third party which may be compromised and lead to man-in-the-middle attacks, brute force attacks, etc. In parallel, there are some other quantum key distribution approaches available to produce keys for the encipherment and decipherment process without the need for a third party. However, there are still some attacks such as photon number splitting attacks and faked state attacks that may be possible with these existing QKD approaches. The primary motivation of our work is to address and avoid such abovementioned existing problems with better and optimal computational overhead for key generation, encipherment, and the decipherment process compared to the existing conventional models. To overcome the existing problems, we proposed a novel dynamic quantum key distribution (QKD) algorithm for critical public infrastructure, which will secure all cyber-physical systems as part of IIoT. In this paper, we used novel multi-state qubit representation to support enhanced dynamic, chaotic quantum key generation with high efficiency and low computational overhead. Our proposed QKD algorithm can create a chaotic set of qubits that act as a part of session-wise dynamic keys used to encipher the IIoT-based large scales of information for secure communication and distribution of sensitive information.

Designing evaluation framework for the empirical assessment of COVID-19 mobile apps in Pakistan

The significant proliferation in the mobile health applications (Apps) amidst Coronaviruses disease 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in decision making problems for healthcare professionals, decision makers and mobile users in Pakistan. This decision making process is also hampered by mobile app trade-offs, multiple features support, evolving healthcare needs and varying vendors. In this regard, evaluation model for mobile apps is presented which completes in three different phases. In first phase, features-based criteria is designed by leveraging Delphi method, and twenty (20) mobile apps are selected from app stores. In second stage, empirical evaluation is performed by using hybrid multi criteria decision approaches like CRiteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method has been used for assigning weights to criteria features; and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method has been used for assessment of mobile app alternatives. In last step, decision making is performed to select the best mobile app for COVID-19 situations. The results suggest that proposed model can be adopted as a guideline by mobile app subscribers, patients and healthcare professionals.

Federated learning-based AI approaches in smart healthcare: concepts, taxonomies, challenges and open issues

Federated Learning (FL), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are the most trending and exciting technology in the intelligent healthcare field. Traditionally, the healthcare system works based on centralized agents sharing their raw data. Therefore, huge vulnerabilities and challenges are still existing in this system. However, integrating with AI, the system would be multiple agent collaborators who are capable of communicating with their desired host efficiently. Again, FL is another interesting feature, which works decentralized manner; it maintains the communication based on a model in the preferred system without transferring the raw data. The combination of FL, AI, and XAI techniques can be capable of minimizing several limitations and challenges in the healthcare system. This paper presents a complete analysis of FL using AI for smart healthcare applications. Initially, we discuss contemporary concepts of emerging technologies such as FL, AI, XAI, and the healthcare system. We integrate and classify the FL-AI with healthcare technologies in different domains. Further, we address the existing problems, including security, privacy, stability, and reliability in the healthcare field. In addition, we guide the readers to solving strategies of healthcare using FL and AI. Finally, we address extensive research areas as well as future potential prospects regarding FL-based AI research in the healthcare management system.

CovMnet–Deep Learning Model for classifying Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Diagnosing COVID-19, current pandemic disease using Chest X-ray images is widely used to evaluate the lung disorders. As the spread of the disease is enormous many medical camps are being conducted to screen the patients and Chest X-ray is a simple imaging modality to detect presence of lung disorders. Manual lung disorder detection using Chest X-ray by radiologist is a tedious process and may lead to inter and intra-rate errors. Various deep convolution neural network techniques were tested for detecting COVID-19 abnormalities in lungs using Chest X-ray images. This paper proposes deep learning model to classify COVID-19 and normal chest X-ray images. Experiments are carried out for deep feature extraction, fine-tuning of convolutional neural networks (CNN) hyper parameters, and end-to-end training of four variants of the CNN model. The proposed CovMnet provide better classification accuracy of 97.4% for COVID-19 /normal than those reported in the previous studies. The proposed CovMnet model has potential to aid radiologist to monitor COVID-19 disease and proves to be an efficient non-invasive COVID-19 diagnostic tool for lung disorders.

Prospect of Internet of Medical Things: A Review on Security Requirements and Solutions

With the widespread and increasing use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in all aspects of daily life, a hopeful future for people, data, and processes is emerging. Extensive spans allow for an integrated life cycle to be created from home to enterprise. The Internet of Medical things (IoMT) forms a flourishing surface that incorporates the sensitive information of human life being sent to doctors or hospitals. These open an enormous space for hackers to utilize flaws of the IoMT network to make a profit. This creates a demand for standardizing regulations and a secure system. Though many authorities are making standards, there are some lacking in the system which makes the product vulnerable. Although many established mechanisms are present for the IoT network, there are a number of obstacles preventing its general implementation in the IoMT network. One of the adoption challenges is the IoMT devices itself, because many IoMT networks consist of battery-powered devices with constrained processing capability. A general overview of the different security integrations with IoT applications has been presented in several papers. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an overview of the IoMT ecosystem, regulations, challenges of standards, security mechanisms using cryptographic solutions, physical unclonable functions (PUF)-based solutions, blockchain, and named data networking (NDN) as well, with pros and cons.

Smart Insole Based on Flexi Force and Flex Sensor for Monitoring Different Body Postures

This study aims to fabricate smart insoles using wireless Flexi force and bend sensing technology. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) film was chosen as the substrate to hold all the sensors. The developed smart insole has a three-layer structure (insole-PVC layer-fabric layer) and is calibrated in an isolation laboratory to evaluate its measurement performance. One male volunteer subject exhibited four different body postures, namely tree pose, forward-leaning, squatting, and forward folding pose. Changes in pressure distribution were considered to be similar for the forward, squat, and forward-folded positions. When subjects performed a full squat, the flex sensor exhibited maximum flexion during the squat position, and the flex sensor response against the squat pose was found to be higher by about 18.18% than in the forward lean, respectively. The tree pose has the highest error rate at the first metatarsal, about 18.6%, of which the maximum absolute relative error of the sensor is less than 5%. Plantar pressure distribution and body posture measurements were successfully validated using Flexi force and flex sensors embedded in the smart insole. The smart insole proposed in this research work has broader prospects for clinical application.

An improved pairing-free certificateless aggregate signature scheme for healthcare wireless medical sensor networks

In healthcare wireless medical sensor networks (HWMSNs), the medical sensor nodes are employed to collect medical data which is transmitted to doctors for diagnosis and treatment. In HWMSNs, medical data is vulnerable to various attacks through public channels. In addition, leakage of patients’ information happens frequently. Hence, secure communication and privacy preservation are major concerns in HWMSNs. To solve the above issues, Zhan et al. put forward a pairing-free certificateless aggregate signature (PF-CLAS) scheme. However, according to our cryptanalysis, the malicious medical sensor node (MSN_i) can generate the forged signature by replacing the public key in the PF-CLAS scheme. Hence, to address this security flaw, we design the improved PF-CLAS scheme that can achieve unforgeability, anonymity, and traceability. Since we have changed the construction of the partial private key, the improved PF-CLAS scheme can resist Type I and Type II attacks under the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm assumption. In terms of the performance evaluation, the proposed scheme outperforms related CLAS schemes, which is more suitable for HWMSNs environments.

Blockchain Assisted Disease Identification of COVID-19 Patients with the Help of IDA-DNN Classifier

Globally, millions of people were affected by the Corona-virus disease-2019 (COVID-19) causing loads of deaths. Most COVID-19 affected people recover in a few spans of weeks. However, certain people even those with a milder variant of the disease persist in experiencing symptoms subsequent to their initial recuperation. Here, a novel Block-Chain (BC)-assisted optimized deep learning algorithm, explicitly improved dragonfly algorithm based Deep Neural Network (IDA-DNN), is proposed for detecting the different diseases of the COVID-19 patients. Initially, the input data of the COVID-19 recovered patients are gathered centered on their post symptoms and their data is amassed as a BC for rendering security to the patient's data. After that, the disease identification of the patient's data is performed with the aid of system training. The training includes '4' disparate datasets for data collection, and then, performs preprocessing, Feature Extraction (FE), Feature Reduction (FR), along with classification utilizing ID-DNN on the gathered inputted data. The IDA-DNN classifies '2' classes (presence of disease and absence of disease) for every type of data. The proposed method's outcomes are examined as well as contrasted with the other prevailing techniques to corroborate that the proposed IDA-DNN detects the COVID-19 more efficiently.

PUFchain 2.0: Hardware-Assisted Robust Blockchain for Sustainable Simultaneous Device and Data Security in Smart Healthcare

This article presents the first-ever hardware-assisted blockchain for simultaneously handling device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents the hardware security primitive physical unclonable functions (PUF) and blockchain technology together as PUFchain 2.0 with a two-level authentication mechanism. The proposed PUFchain 2.0 security primitive presents a scalable approach by allowing Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices to connect and obtain PUF keys from the edge server with an embedded PUF module instead of connecting a PUF module to each device. The PUF key, once assigned to a particular media access control (MAC) address by the miner, will be unique for that MAC address and cannot be assigned to other devices. PUFs are developed based on internal micro-manufacturing process variations during chip fabrication. This property of PUFs is integrated with blockchain by including the PUF key of the IoMT into blockchain for authentication. The robustness of the proposed Proof of PUF-Enabled authentication consensus mechanism in PUFchain 2.0 has been substantiated through test bed evaluation. Arbiter PUFs have been used for the experimental validation of PUFchain 2.0. From the obtained 200 PUF keys, 75% are reliable and the Hamming distance of the PUF module is 48%. Obtained database outputs along with other metrics have been presented for validating the potential of PUFchain 2.0 in smart healthcare.

Automatic detection of cognitive impairment in elderly people using an entertainment chatbot with Natural Language Processing capabilities

Previous researchers have proposed intelligent systems for therapeutic monitoring of cognitive impairments. However, most existing practical approaches for this purpose are based on manual tests. This raises issues such as excessive caretaking effort and the white-coat effect. To avoid these issues, we present an intelligent conversational system for entertaining elderly people with news of their interest that monitors cognitive impairment transparently. Automatic chatbot dialogue stages allow assessing content description skills and detecting cognitive impairment with Machine Learning algorithms. We create these dialogue flows automatically from updated news items using Natural Language Generation techniques. The system also infers the gold standard of the answers to the questions, so it can assess cognitive capabilities automatically by comparing these answers with the user responses. It employs a similarity metric with values in [0, 1], in increasing level of similarity. To evaluate the performance and usability of our approach, we have conducted field tests with a test group of 30 elderly people in the earliest stages of dementia, under the supervision of gerontologists. In the experiments, we have analysed the effect of stress and concentration in these users. Those without cognitive impairment performed up to five times better. In particular, the similarity metric varied between 0.03, for stressed and unfocused participants, and 0.36, for relaxed and focused users. Finally, we developed a Machine Learning algorithm based on textual analysis features for automatic cognitive impairment detection, which attained accuracy, F-measure and recall levels above 80%. We have thus validated the automatic approach to detect cognitive impairment in elderly people based on entertainment content. The results suggest that the solution has strong potential for long-term user-friendly therapeutic monitoring of elderly people.

A novel approach for DDoS attacks detection in COVID-19 scenario for small entrepreneurs

The current COVID-19 issue has altered the way of doing business. Now that most customers prefer to do business online, many companies are shifting their business models, which attracts cyber attackers to launch several kinds of cyberattacks against commercial companies simultaneously. The most common and lethal DDoS attack disables the victim's online resources. While large businesses can afford defensive measures against DDoS assaults, the situation is different for new entrepreneurs. Their lack of security resources restricts their ability to ward off DDoS attacks. Here, we aim to highlight the problems that prospective entrepreneurs should be aware of before joining the business, followed by a filtering mechanism that efficiently identifies DDoS assaults in the COVID-19 scenario, which is the subject of our research. The suggested approach employs statistical and machine learning techniques to discriminate between DDoS attack data and regular communication. Our suggested framework is cost-effective and identifies DDoS attack traffic with a 92.8% accuracy rate.

A novel approach for DDoS attacks detection in COVID-19 scenario for small entrepreneurs

The current COVID-19 issue has altered the way of doing business. Now that most customers prefer to do business online, many companies are shifting their business models, which attracts cyber attackers to launch several kinds of cyberattacks against commercial companies simultaneously. The most common and lethal DDoS attack disables the victim's online resources. While large businesses can afford defensive measures against DDoS assaults, the situation is different for new entrepreneurs. Their lack of security resources restricts their ability to ward off DDoS attacks. Here, we aim to highlight the problems that prospective entrepreneurs should be aware of before joining the business, followed by a filtering mechanism that efficiently identifies DDoS assaults in the COVID-19 scenario, which is the subject of our research. The suggested approach employs statistical and machine learning techniques to discriminate between DDoS attack data and regular communication. Our suggested framework is cost-effective and identifies DDoS attack traffic with a 92.8% accuracy rate.

A computer-aid multi-task light-weight network for macroscopic feces diagnosis

The abnormal traits and colors of feces typically indicate that the patients are probably suffering from tumor or digestive-system diseases. Thus a fast, accurate and automatic health diagnosis system based on feces is urgently necessary for improving the examination speed and reducing the infection risk. The rarity of the pathological images would deteriorate the accuracy performance of the trained models. In order to alleviate this problem, we employ augmentation and over-sampling to expand the samples of the classes that have few samples in the training batch. In order to achieve an impressive recognition performance and leverage the latent correlation between the traits and colors of feces pathological samples, a multi-task network is developed to recognize colors and traits of the macroscopic feces images. The parameter number of a single multi-task network is generally much smaller than the total parameter number of multiple single-task networks, so the storage cost is reduced. The loss function of the multi-task network is the weighted sum of the losses of the two tasks. In this paper, the weights of the tasks are determined according to their difficulty levels that are measured by the fitted linear functions. The sufficient experiments confirm that the proposed method can yield higher accuracies, and the efficiency is also improved.

Diagnosing COVID-19 from CT Image of Lung Segmentation & Classification with Deep Learning Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Early-stage exposure and analysis of diseases are life-threatening causes for controlling the spread of COVID-19. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) centered approaches have projected intended for COVID-19 during the initial stage through the Computed Tomography (CT) mechanism is to simplify and aid with the analysis. However, these methodologiesundergocommencing one of the following issues: each CT scan slice treated separately and train and evaluate from the same dataset the strategies for image collections. Independent slice therapy is the identical patient involved in the preparation and set the tests at the same time, which can yield inaccurate outcomes. It also poses the issue of whether or not an individual should compare the scans of the same patient. This paper aims to establish image classifiers to determine whether a patient tested positive or negative for COVID-19 centered on lung CT scan imageries. In doing so, a Visual Geometry Group-16 (VGG-16) and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) 3-layer model used for marking. The images are first segmented using K-means Clustering before the classification to increase classification efficiency. Then, the VGG-16 model and the 3-layer CNN model implemented on the raw and segmented data. The impact of the segmentation of the image and two versions are explored and compared, respectively. Various tuning techniques were performed and tested to improve the VGG-16 model's performance, including increasing epochs, optimizer adjustment, and decreasing the learning rate. Moreover, pre-trained weights of the VGG-16 the model added to enhance the algorithm.

A light-weight convolutional Neural Network Architecture for classification of COVID-19 chest X-Ray images

The COVID-19 pandemic has opened numerous challenges for scientists to use massive data to develop an automatic diagnostic tool for COVID-19. Since the outbreak in January 2020, COVID-19 has caused a substantial destructive impact on society and human life. Numerous studies have been conducted in search of a suitable solution to test COVID-19. Artificial intelligence (AI) based research is not behind in this race, and many AI-based models have been proposed. This paper proposes a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model to classify COVID and Non_COVID patients by analyzing the hidden features in the X-Ray images. The model has been evaluated with different standard metrics to prove the reliability of the model. The model obtained 98.78%, 93.22%, and 92.7% accuracy in the training, validation, and testing phases. In addition, the model achieved 0.964 scores in the Area Under Curve (AUC) metric. We compared the model with four state-of-art pre-trained models (VGG16, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB6). The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed CNN model is a candidate for an automatic diagnostic tool for the classification of COVID-19 patients using chest X-ray images. This research proposes a technique to classify COVID-19 patients and does not claim any medical diagnosis accuracy.

Longitudinal Study of a Website for Assessing American Presidential Candidates and Decision Making of Potential Election Irregularities Detection

We employ the concept of word sense disambiguation to determine the inherent meaning of voter intentions regarding possible political candidates from the 2016 Presidential election. We present our findings based on a website (www.presidentselect.com) that we developed, where candidates can be examined and their true assets and competencies in three major areas of eligibility, education, and experience inputs can be deciphered. Data envelope analysis is used to determine underlying word instances for elected and successful outputs. We also utilize our web site results to longitudinally extend these findings for decision making of potential election fraud detection in the 2020 Presidential election, utilizing Benford’s Law. Our results shed light on these phenomenon and provide new insights into the word sense disambiguation literature.

Innovative online learning strategies for the successful construction of student self-awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic: Merging TAM with TPB

The ongoing Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presents several challenges to the education system including technical, cognitive, managerial, and behavioral ones. As a result of these pressures, education systems are undergoing dramatic changes. The persistent state of the pandemic leading to anincrease in connectivity between teachers and students' devices, and the growth of online learning, is changing how students learn and the risks they have to manage themselves. The education sector typically employs some technical models to assess students' attitudes. Moreover, there is an ongoing intention to use online learning. In addition to technological factors, psychological factors were incorporated into the assessment. And intentions and attitudes are from a cognitive standpoint. Based on empirical research on online learning conducted among university students under epidemic normalization, the main goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between self-awareness and the willingness to use it continuously. During COVID-19 pandemic, the research framework created for this study was tested on 429 college students. The integrated Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) model's hypotheses were empirically examined. It was found that self-awareness and the intention to use online learning during the epidemic are consistently related. Self-awareness profoundly and significantly impacts the decision to continue using online learning. The study's findings can gauge participants' intent to continue. This study's result can help assess the intention to continue to use online learning during COVID-19.This can help provide more valid assessment results beneficial for the management of online learning.

Emerging IoT Applications in Sustainable Smart Cities for COVID-19: Network Security and Data Preservation Challenges with Future Directions

COVID-19 is a global infectious disease that can be easily spread by the contiguity of infected people. To prevent from COVID-19 and reduce its impact in sustainable smart cities, the global research communities are working relentlessly by harnessing the emerging technologies to develop the safest diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment procedures, and Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the pioneers among them. IoT can perform a pivotal role to diminish its immense contagious rate by suitable utilization in emerging healthcare IoT applications in sustainable smart cities. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to outline a survey of the emerging healthcare IoT applications practiced in the perspective of COVID-19 pandemic in terms of network architecture security, trustworthiness, authentication, and data preservation followed by identifying existing challenges to set the future research directions. The salient contributions of this work deal with the accomplishment of a detailed and comprehensive literature review of COVID-19 starting from 2019 through 2021 in the context of emerging healthcare IoT technology. In addition, we extend the correlated contributions of this work by highlighting the weak aspects of the existing emerging healthcare IoT applications, security of different network layers and secure communication environment followed by some associated requirements to address these challenges. Moreover, we also identify future research directions in sustainable smart cities for emerging healthcare IoT utilization in the context of COVID-19 with the most productive results and least network implementation costs.

A novel and efficient deep learning approach for COVID-19 detection using X-ray imaging modality

With the exponential growth of COVID-19 cases, medical practitioners are searching for accurate and quick automated detection methods to prevent Covid from spreading while trying to reduce the computational requirement of devices. In this research article, a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based accurate and efficient ensemble model using deep learning is being proposed with 2161 COVID-19, 2022 pneumonia, and 5863 normal chest X-ray images that has been collected from previous publications and other online resources. To improve the detection accuracy contrast enhancement and image normalization have been done to produce better quality images at the pre-processing level. Further data augmentation methods are used by creating modified versions of images in the dataset to train the four efficient CNN models (Inceptionv3, DenseNet121, Xception, InceptionResNetv2) Experimental results provide 98.33% accuracy for binary class and 92.36% for multiclass. The performance evaluation metrics reveal that this tool can be very helpful for early disease diagnosis.

Covira: A COVID-19 risk assessment, visualization and communication tool

Assessing the possibility of Coronavirus infection and its risk on an individual's life, estimating the spatial transmission risk based on the dynamic condition of a particular place into consideration, and communicating the same to the public is crucial for minimizing the potential impact of COVID-19. With the increase in cases world-wide, new patterns are being unfolded. Nevertheless, an application for risk assessment will not only help the researcher to quickly verify the proof of concept but also is a powerful tool to bring into notice the results immediately as one of the perfect tools for risk communication. Covira (https://covira.info) is an open-source web-based software that captures the response, calculates personal as well as regional risk, and displays the result to the end-user in the form of maps and risk cards.

A smart healthcare framework for detection and monitoring of COVID-19 using IoT and cloud computing

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a very contagious infection that has drawn the world's attention. Modeling such diseases can be extremely valuable in predicting their effects. Although classic statistical modeling may provide adequate models, it may also fail to understand the data's intricacy. An automatic COVID-19 detection system based on computed tomography (CT) scan or X-ray images is effective, but a robust system design is challenging. In this study, we propose an intelligent healthcare system that integrates IoT-cloud technologies. This architecture uses smart connectivity sensors and deep learning (DL) for intelligent decision-making from the perspective of the smart city. The intelligent system tracks the status of patients in real time and delivers reliable, timely, and high-quality healthcare facilities at a low cost. COVID-19 detection experiments are performed using DL to test the viability of the proposed system. We use a sensor for recording, transferring, and tracking healthcare data. CT scan images from patients are sent to the cloud by IoT sensors, where the cognitive module is stored. The system decides the patient status by examining the images of the CT scan. The DL cognitive module makes the real-time decision on the possible course of action. When information is conveyed to a cognitive module, we use a state-of-the-art classification algorithm based on DL, i.e., ResNet50, to detect and classify whether the patients are normal or infected by COVID-19. We validate the proposed system's robustness and effectiveness using two benchmark publicly available datasets (Covid-Chestxray dataset and Chex-Pert dataset). At first, a dataset of 6000 images is prepared from the above two datasets. The proposed system was trained on the collection of images from 80% of the datasets and tested with 20% of the data. Cross-validation is performed using a tenfold cross-validation technique for performance evaluation. The results indicate that the proposed system gives an accuracy of 98.6%, a sensitivity of 97.3%, a specificity of 98.2%, and an F1-score of 97.87%. Results clearly show that the accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and F1-score of our proposed method are high. The comparison shows that the proposed system performs better than the existing state-of-the-art systems. The proposed system will be helpful in medical diagnosis research and healthcare systems. It will also support the medical experts for COVID-19 screening and lead to a precious second opinion.

A statistical approach to secure health care services from DDoS attacks during COVID-19 pandemic

Over the course of this year, more than a billion people have been afflicted by the COVID-19 outbreak. As long as individuals maintain their social distance, they should all be secure at this period. Because of this, there has been a rise in the usage of different online technologies, but at the same time, there has also been a rise in the likelihood of different cyber-attacks. A DDoS assault, the most prevalent and deadly of them all, impairs an online resource for its users. Thus, in this paper, we have proposed a filtering approach that can work efficiently in the COVID-19 scenario and detect the DDoS attack. We base our proposed approach on statistical methods like packet score and entropy variation for the identification of DDoS attack traffic. We have implemented our proposed approach on Omnet++ and for testing its efficiency we have checked it with different test cases. Our proposed approach detects the DDoS attack traffic with 96% accuracy and can also clearly have differentiated the DDoS attack traffic from the flash crowd.

Security, Privacy, and Reliability in Digital Healthcare Systems Using Blockchain

According to the security breach level index, millions of records are stolen worldwide on every single day. Personal health records are the most targeted records on the internet, and they are considered sensitive, and valuable. Security and privacy are the most important parameters of cryptography and encryption. They reduce the availability of data on patients and healthcare to the appropriate personnel and ultimately lead to a barrier in the transfer of healthcare into a digital health system. Using a permission blockchain to share healthcare data can reduce security and privacy issues. According to the literature, most healthcare systems rely on a centralized system, which is more prone to security vulnerabilities. The existing blockchain-based healthcare schemes provide only a data-sharing framework, but they lack security and privacy. To cope with these kinds of security issues, we have designed a novel security algorithm that provides security as well as privacy with much better efficiency and a lower cost. Hence, in this research, we have proposed a patient healthcare framework that provides greater security, reliability, and authentication compared to existing blockchain-based access control.

Machine learning-based diffusion model for prediction of coronavirus-19 outbreak

The coronavirus pandemic has been globally impacting the health and prosperity of people. A persistent increase in the number of positive cases has boost the stress among governments across the globe. There is a need of approach which gives more accurate predictions of outbreak. This paper presents a novel approach called diffusion prediction model for prediction of number of coronavirus cases in four countries: India, France, China and Nepal. Diffusion prediction model works on the diffusion process of the human contact. Model considers two forms of spread: when the spread takes time after infecting one person and when the spread is immediate after infecting one person. It makes the proposed model different over other state-of-the art models. It is giving more accurate results than other state-of-the art models. The proposed diffusion prediction model forecasts the number of new cases expected to occur in next 4 weeks. The model has predicted the number of confirmed cases, recovered cases, deaths and active cases. The model can facilitate government to be well prepared for any abrupt rise in this pandemic. The performance is evaluated in terms of accuracy and error rate and compared with the prediction results of support vector machine, logistic regression model and convolution neural network. The results prove the efficiency of the proposed model.

Security challenges and solutions using healthcare cloud computing

Cloud computing is among the most beneficial solutions to digital problems. Security is one of the focal issues in cloud computing technology, and this study aims at investigating security issues of cloud computing and their probable solutions. A systematic review was performed using Scopus, Pubmed, Science Direct, and Web of Science databases. Once the title and abstract were evaluated, the quality of studies was assessed in order to choose the most relevant according to exclusion and inclusion criteria. Then, the full texts of studies selected were read thoroughly to extract the necessary results. According to the review, data security, availability, and integrity, as well as information confidentiality and network security, were the major challenges in cloud security. Further, data encryption, authentication, and classification, besides application programming interfaces (API), were security solutions to cloud infrastructure. Data encryption could be applied to store and retrieve data from the cloud in order to provide secure communication. Besides, several central challenges, which make the cloud security engineering process problematic, have been considered in this study.

Res-CovNet: an internet of medical health things driven COVID-19 framework using transfer learning

Major countries are globally facing difficult situations due to this pandemic disease, COVID-19. There are high chances of getting false positives and false negatives identifying the COVID-19 symptoms through existing medical practices such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and RT-PCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction). It might lead to a community spread of the disease. The alternative of these tests can be CT (Computer Tomography) imaging or X-rays of the lungs to identify the patient with COVID-19 symptoms more accurately. Furthermore, by using feasible and usable technology to automate the identification of COVID-19, the facilities can be improved. This notion became the basic framework, Res-CovNet, of the implemented methodology, a hybrid methodology to bring different platforms into a single platform. This basic framework is incorporated into IoMT based framework, a web-based service to identify and classify various forms of pneumonia or COVID-19 utilizing chest X-ray images. For the front end, the.NET framework along with C# language was utilized, MongoDB was utilized for the storage aspect, Res-CovNet was utilized for the processing aspect. Deep learning combined with the notion forms a comprehensive implementation of the framework, Res-CovNet, to classify the COVID-19 affected patients from pneumonia-affected patients as both lung imaging looks similar to the naked eye. The implemented framework, Res-CovNet, developed with the technique, transfer learning in which ResNet-50 used as a pre-trained model and then extended with classification layers. The work implemented using the data of X-ray images collected from the various trustable sources that include cases such as normal, bacterial pneumonia, viral pneumonia, and COVID-19, with the overall size of the data is about 5856. The accuracy of the model implemented is about 98.4% in identifying COVID-19 against the normal cases. The accuracy of the model is about 96.2% in the case of identifying COVID-19 against all other cases, as mentioned.

An improved association rule mining algorithm for large data

The data with the advancement of information technology are increasing on daily basis. The data mining technique has been applied to various fields. The complexity and execution time are the major factors viewed in existing data mining techniques. With the rapid development of database technology, many data storage increases, and data mining technology has become more and more important and expanded to various fields in recent years. Association rule mining is the most active research technique of data mining. Data mining technology is used for potentially useful information extraction and knowledge from big data sets. The results demonstrate that the precision ratio of the presented technique is high comparable to other existing techniques with the same recall rate, i.e., the R-tree algorithm. The proposed technique by the mining effectively controls the noise data, and the precision rate is also kept very high, which indicates the highest accuracy of the technique. This article makes a systematic and detailed analysis of data mining technology by using the Apriori algorithm.

A novel analysis of COVID 19 risk in India incorporating climatic and socioeconomic Factors

This study investigates the influence of climate variables (pressure, relative humidity, temperature and wind speed) in inducing risk due to COVID 19 at rural, urban and total (rural and urban) population scale in 623 pandemic affected districts of India incorporating the socioeconomic vulnerability factors. We employed nonstationary extreme value analysis to model the different quantiles of cumulative COVID 19 cases in the districts by using climatic factors as covariates. Wind speed was the most dominating climatic factor followed by relative humidity, pressure, and temperature in the evolution of the cases. The results reveal that stationarity, i.e., the COVID 19 cases which are independent of pressure, relative humidity, temperature and wind speed, existed only in 148 (23.7%) out of 623 districts. Whereas, strong nonstationarity, i.e., climate dependence, was detected in the cases of 474 (76.08%) districts. 334 (53.6%), 200 (32.1%) and 336 (53.9%) districts out of 623 districts were at high risk (or above) at rural, urban and total population scales respectively. 19 out of 35 states were observed to be under high (or above) Kerala, Maharashtra, Goa and Delhi being the most risked ones. The study provides high-risk maps of COVID 19 pandemic at the district level and is aimed at supporting the decision-makers to identify climatic and socioeconomic factors in augmenting the risks.

A Data-Driven Predictive Machine Learning Model for Efficiently Storing Temperature-Sensitive Medical Products, Such as Vaccines: Case Study: Pharmacies in Rwanda

Temperature control is the key element during medicine storage. Pharmacies sell some medical products which are kept in fridges. The opening and closing of the fridge while taking some medicine makes the outside hot air enter the fridge, which will increase the inner fridge temperature. When the frequency of opening and closing of the fridge is increased, the temperature may go beyond the allowed storage temperature range. In this paper, we are proposing a model with the help of machine learning that will be used in multiple chambers fridges to keep indicating the time remaining for the inner temperature to go beyond the allowed range, and if the time is short, the system will propose to the pharmacist not to open that particular room and proposes a room that has enough time slots (time to reach the upper limit temperature). By using training data got from a thermoelectric cooler-based fridge, we constructed a multiple linear regression model that can predict the required time for a given room to reach the cut-off temperature in case that room is opened. The built model was evaluated using the coefficient of determination R 2 and is found to be 77%, and then it can be used to develop a multiple room smart fridge for efficiently storing highly sensitive medical products.

A robust and lightweight secure access scheme for cloud based E-healthcare services

Traditional healthcare services have transitioned into modern healthcare services where doctors remotely diagnose the patients. Cloud computing plays a significant role in this change by providing easy access to patients' medical records to all stakeholders, such as doctors, nurses, patients, life insurance agents, etc. Cloud services are scalable, cost-effective, and offer a broad range of mobile access to patients' electronic health record (EHR). Despite the cloud's enormous benefits like real-time data access, patients' EHR security and privacy are major concerns. Since the information about patients' health is highly sensitive and crucial, sharing it over the unsecured wireless medium brings many security challenges such as eavesdropping, modifications, etc. Considering the security needs of remote healthcare, this paper proposes a robust and lightweight, secure access scheme for cloud-based E-healthcare services. The proposed scheme addresses the potential threats to E-healthcare by providing a secure interface to stakeholders and prohibiting unauthorized users from accessing information stored in the cloud. The scheme makes use of multiple keys formed through the key derivation function (KDF) to ensure end-to-end ciphering of information for preventing misuse. The rights to access the cloud services are provided based on the identity and the association between stakeholders, thus ensuring privacy. Due to its simplicity and robustness, the proposed scheme is the best fit for protecting data security and privacy in cloud-based E-healthcare services.

End-to-End AI-Based Point-of-Care Diagnosis System for Classifying Respiratory Illnesses and Early Detection of COVID-19: A Theoretical Framework

Respiratory symptoms can be caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms: coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the factors that contributed to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic were the late diagnosis or misinterpretation of COVID-19 symptoms as regular flu-like symptoms. Research has shown that one of the possible differentiators of the underlying causes of different respiratory diseases could be the cough sound, which comes in different types and forms. A reliable lab-free tool for early and accurate diagnosis, which can differentiate between different respiratory diseases is therefore very much needed, particularly during the current pandemic. This concept paper discusses a medical hypothesis of an end-to-end portable system that can record data from patients with symptoms, including coughs (voluntary or involuntary) and translate them into health data for diagnosis, and with the aid of machine learning, classify them into different respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. With the ongoing efforts to stop the spread of the COVID-19 disease everywhere today, and against similar diseases in the future, our proposed low cost and user-friendly theoretical solution could play an important part in the early diagnosis.