Blockchain based transparent and reliable framework for wheat crop supply chain

The wheat crop that fulfills 35% of human food demand is facing several problems due to a lack of transparency, security, reliability, and traceability in the existing agriculture supply chain. Many systems have been developed for the agriculture supply chain to overcome such issues, however, monopolistic centralized control is the biggest hurdle to realizing the use of such systems. It has eventually gained consumers' trust in branded products and rejected other products due to the lack of traceable supply chain information. This study proposes a blockchain-based framework for supply chain traceability which provides trustable, transparent, secure, and reliable services for the wheat crop. A crypto token called wheat coin (WC) has been introduced to keep track of transactions among the stakeholders of the wheat supply chain. Moreover, an initial coin offering (ICO) of WC, crypto wallets, and an economic model are proposed. Furthermore, a smart contract-based transaction system has been devised for the transparency of wheat crop transactions and conversion of WC to fiat and vice versa. We have developed the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to improve data availability, security, and transparency which stores encrypted private data of farmers, businesses, and merchants. Lastly, the results of the experiments show that the proposed framework shows better performance as compared to previous crop supply chain solutions in terms of latency to add-blocks, per-minute transactions, average gas charge for the transaction, and transaction verification time. Performance analysis with Bitcoin and Ethereum shows the superior performance of the proposed system.

Analyzing patients satisfaction level for medical services using twitter data

Public concern regarding health systems has experienced a rapid surge during the last two years due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Accordingly, medical professionals and health-related institutions reach out to patients and seek feedback to analyze, monitor, and uplift medical services. Such views and perceptions are often shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Twitter is the most popular and commonly used by the researcher as an online platform for instant access to real-time news, opinions, and discussion. Its trending hashtags (#) and viral content make it an ideal hub for monitoring public opinion on a variety of topics. The tweets are extracted using three hashtags #healthcare, #healthcare services, and #medical facilities. Also, location and tweet sentiment analysis are considered in this study. Several recent studies deployed Twitter datasets using ML and DL models, but the results show lower accuracy. In addition, the studies did not perform extensive comparative analysis and lack validation. This study addresses two research questions: first, what are the sentiments of people toward medical services worldwide? and second, how effective are the machine learning and deep learning approaches for the classification of sentiment on healthcare tweets? Experiments are performed using several well-known machine learning models including support vector machine, logistic regression, Gaussian naive Bayes, extra tree classifier, k nearest neighbor, random forest, decision tree, and AdaBoost. In addition, this study proposes a transfer learning-based LSTM-ETC model that effectively predicts the customer's satisfaction level from the healthcare dataset. Results indicate that despite the best performance by the ETC model with an 0.88 accuracy score, the proposed model outperforms with a 0.95 accuracy score. Predominantly, the people are happy about the provided medical services as the ratio of the positive sentiments is substantially higher than the negative sentiments. The sentiments, either positive or negative, play a crucial role in making important decisions through customer feedback and enhancing quality.

Consortium Framework Using Blockchain for Asthma Healthcare in Pandemics

Asthma is a deadly disease that affects the lungs and air supply of the human body. Coronavirus and its variants also affect the airways of the lungs. Asthma patients approach hospitals mostly in a critical condition and require emergency treatment, which creates a burden on health institutions during pandemics. The similar symptoms of asthma and coronavirus create confusion for health workers during patient handling and treatment of disease. The unavailability of patient history to physicians causes complications in proper diagnostics and treatments. Many asthma patient deaths have been reported especially during pandemics, which necessitates an efficient framework for asthma patients. In this article, we have proposed a blockchain consortium healthcare framework for asthma patients. The proposed framework helps in managing asthma healthcare units, coronavirus patient records and vaccination centers, insurance companies, and government agencies, which are connected through the secure blockchain network. The proposed framework increases data security and scalability as it stores encrypted patient data on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and keeps data hash values on the blockchain. The patient data are traceable and accessible to physicians and stakeholders, which helps in accurate diagnostics, timely treatment, and the management of patients. The smart contract ensures the execution of all business rules. The patient profile generation mechanism is also discussed. The experiment results revealed that the proposed framework has better transaction throughput, query delay, and security than existing solutions.

Building Heating and Cooling Load Prediction Using Ensemble Machine Learning Model

Building energy consumption prediction has become an important research problem within the context of sustainable homes and smart cities. Data-driven approaches have been regarded as the most suitable for integration into smart houses. With the wide deployment of IoT sensors, the data generated from these sensors can be used for modeling and forecasting energy consumption patterns. Existing studies lag in prediction accuracy and various attributes of buildings are not very well studied. This study follows a data-driven approach in this regard. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that an ensemble model is proposed, which provides higher performance regarding cooling and heating load prediction. Moreover, the influence of different features on heating and cooling load is investigated. Experiments are performed by considering different features such as glazing area, orientation, height, relative compactness, roof area, surface area, and wall area. Results indicate that relative compactness, surface area, and wall area play a significant role in selecting the appropriate cooling and heating load for a building. The proposed model achieves 0.999 R2 for heating load prediction and 0.997 R2 for cooling load prediction, which is superior to existing state-of-the-art models. The precise prediction of heating and cooling load, can help engineers design energy-efficient buildings, especially in the context of future smart homes.

Thyroid Disease Prediction Using Selective Features and Machine Learning Techniques

Simple Summary

The study presents a thyroid disease prediction approach which utilizes random forest-based features to obtain high accuracy. The approach can obtain a 0.99 accuracy to predict ten thyroid diseases.

Abstract

Thyroid disease prediction has emerged as an important task recently. Despite existing approaches for its diagnosis, often the target is binary classification, the used datasets are small-sized and results are not validated either. Predominantly, existing approaches focus on model optimization and the feature engineering part is less investigated. To overcome these limitations, this study presents an approach that investigates feature engineering for machine learning and deep learning models. Forward feature selection, backward feature elimination, bidirectional feature elimination, and machine learning-based feature selection using extra tree classifiers are adopted. The proposed approach can predict Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (primary hypothyroid), binding protein (increased binding protein), autoimmune thyroiditis (compensated hypothyroid), and non-thyroidal syndrome (NTIS) (concurrent non-thyroidal illness). Extensive experiments show that the extra tree classifier-based selected feature yields the best results with 0.99 accuracy and an F1 score when used with the random forest classifier. Results suggest that the machine learning models are a better choice for thyroid disease detection regarding the provided accuracy and the computational complexity. K-fold cross-validation and performance comparison with existing studies corroborate the superior performance of the proposed approach.