ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruption in the healthcare market, which resulted in shortages of essential healthcare products. The pandemic exacerbated the problems that already existed in the healthcare supply chain, such as poor data availability, transparency, and accessibility. Such problems necessitate the introduction of a solution that is capable of managing products, maintaining ownership, facilitating trading, and delivering products in a traceable, auditable, and trustworthy manner. In this article, we propose a nonfungible-token-based solution for the management of healthcare products, where the ownership of a product is maintained by using digital certification, the trade and delivery of healthcare products is facilitated by a smart contract, and disputes are settled by an arbitrator while keeping all related information on-chain for auditing purposes. We utilize the Interplanetary File System to store the metadata of healthcare products to avoid storing large-sized data on the blockchain. We present system diagrams and algorithms along with the implementation details. We conduct security testing to demonstrate that our solution is resilient and secure against common vulnerabilities and exploits. We compare our solution with the existing solutions to show its distinctive features and novelty. The smart contracts code is made publicly available on GitHub. Author
ABSTRACT
The effects of climate change can be seen immediately in ecosystems. Recent events have resulted in a commitment to the Paris Agreement for the reduction of carbon emissions by a significant amount by the year 2030. Rapid urbanisation is taking place to provide room for an increasing number of people's residences. Increasing the size of a city and the number of people living there creates a daily need for consumable resources. In the areas of transportation, supply chains, and the utilisation of renewable energy sources, deliver on pledges that promote the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations. As a result, the supply chain needs to be handled effectively to meet the requirements of growing cities. Management of the supply chain should be in harmony with the environment;nevertheless, the question of how to manage a sustainable supply chain without having an impact on the environment is still mostly understood. The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual model that may be used to maintain a sustainable supply chain with electric vehicles in such a way that caters to both environmental concerns and human requirements. As part of the continual process of achieving sustainability, interrelationships between the various aspects that are being investigated, comprehended, and applied are provided by the model that was developed. It is self-evident that governmental and international organisations that are concerned with supply-demand side information will benefit from such a model, and these organisations will locate viable solutions in accordance with the model's recommendations. Beneficiaries consist of individuals who are active in the supply chain and are concerned with supply-demand side information. These individuals also need to understand how to effectively manage this information.
ABSTRACT
Collecting important information helps physicians, specialists, and health care providers to simplify the care of their patients. However, because patients do not explicitly retain their data, autonomous possession and the right to protect personal data develop. This paper discovers the block chain's potential to improve health care by placing the patient at the center of the system and improving health data protection and collaboration. The main goal of this research work is to discover the vast power of BitCoin technology that can be applied to patient records and health record protection management. As a dispensed era, Blockchain can be very beneficial, giving sufferers control over their statistics and impartial identification. With the COVID-19 pandemic, existing health information exchange systems are being put through the ringer. There is an increase in patient information sharing, as well as the need to respond to medical data requests more efficiently. There are some limitations in the current health information technologies, including the inability to remotely share medical data beyond their protected, local data stores. As a result, a secure and user-centric approach to accessing and controlling sensitive medical data is provided that is based on Blockchain immutability and decentralization. An innovative peer-to-peer system underpins the framework. Information is distributed through smart contracts that are connected to a blockchain-based protocol to ensure data integrity and traceability. Implementing the framework over a pilot study demonstrates its effectiveness. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Billions of dollars lost has been recorded over the past decade due to the overproduction and underconsumption of medical supplies. The overproducation and underconsumption are usually due to the lack of accountability, transparency, traceability, audit, assessment, security, and trust features in the current healthcare supply chain systems. It is required to ensure that everyone is getting a fair share of medical supplies without unnecessary waste. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution that ensures the commitment and accountability of all participants to prevent them from producing any unnecessary waste. We introduce five phases, such as registration, commitment, production, delivery, and consumption, to perform the waste assessment accurately and fairly. We develop four smart contracts that ensure data provenance, transparency, security, and accountability while recording all actions on an immutable ledger automatically.We utilize offchain decentralized storage to deal with the large data problem.We present five algorithms and discuss each phase of the proposed solution, along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details.We conduct the security analysis to ensure that our smart contracts are secure enough and they do not have vulnerabilities and flaws. The smart contracts code is made publicly available on GitHub. Author
ABSTRACT
Brackishwater aquaculture sector is dominated by the exotic vannamei shrimp farming, which is the economic engine of Indian aquaculture. In 2019-20, exports of 12,89,651 t of Indian marine products fetched foreign exchange worth 246,662.85 crores and farmed shrimps accounted for about two-thirds of the shrimps exported. Shrimp farming is export oriented and market price often fluctuates widely impacting the profitability significantly. We conducted this study to estimate technical efficiency of the shrimp farmers in Nellore District, Andhra Pradesh which tops in shrimp aquaculture in the country. The data were collected through structured questionnaire using personal interview from 80 farmers during COVID 2020 pandemic period. The farm specific technical efficiency varied from 75 to 94% with a mean of 93%. The estimates of the discrepancy parameter ?? indicated that 93% of the difference between the maximum possible output and actual output were due to differences in technical inefficiencies of farmers. Feed and labour are the significant variables compared to other variables. The results indicated that farmers need to be encouraged to apply more feed to increase shrimp production.
ABSTRACT
Purpose The purpose of this study is to comprehend the approach and adaptation of research and development (R&D) professionals in managing work and non-work life during Covid-19. Besides, it investigates the influence of organizational culture on extra-role behavior both within and outside the organizational boundaries during uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach Being an exploratory study, the data were generated through the in-depth personal interview from 23 respondents of the Indian Space Research Organization. Besides, the study also used data from secondary sources. The authors followed thematic analysis for eliciting themes from the text data. Findings Primarily, it found that the organizational culture may influence employees to perform extra-role behavior within and outside the organizational boundaries during the pandemic. Besides, it found that R&D professionals are adaptive toward the work from home culture. Research limitations/implications The qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews of 23 R&D professionals during the Covid-19. Future studies may conduct a larger-scale quantitative study to generalize the findings. Implications for future research on hybrid work culture are discussed. Practical implications This study hints that employers need to move from a short-term transactional approach to a long-term cultural approach to navigate extreme uncertainty. It also highlights reorientation of human resource professionals in managing workplace evolution. Originality/value The study extends the literature on organizational culture by attributing culture for the extra-role behaviors of R&D professionals beyond the organizational boundary and navigating uncertainty.
ABSTRACT
Diabetes mellitus is disease in disguise but is one of the deadliest diseases of all time. Its chronic nature is evident during the COVID-19 pandemic situation when the fatality rate was the most in the diabetes patient. India is home to the 77 million diabetes patient as hence called as the diabetes capital of the world. Diabetes is not a one-time disease but depends on various factors like lifestyle, age, high blood pressure, gene of ancestors, etc. Diabetes cannot be prevented but can be controlled when it is predicted at proper time. Thus, a proper prediction paradigm is the need of the hour. In our work, we will be comparing at least 10 machine learning classification algorithms like Zero-R, decision tree, naïve Bayes, random forest, ripper, gradient boosting, K-nearest neighbours, support vector machine, logistic regression, AdaBoost and artificial neural network too. We will be using PIMA Indian datasets which is one of the most widely datasets to predict diabetes and very simple. Hence, we did not see the use of feature selection to reduce the dimensionality. A few measurement metrics are compared for the algorithms used to predict. Our result shows the highest prediction accuracy of 80% with logistic regression classifier. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Telehealth has gained a huge traction during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Telehealth enables physicians and medical care providers to remotely care for patients and monitor their symptoms. Today's telehealth systems fall short in providing transparent, immutable, traceable, auditable, secure, and trustworthy services. In addition, they are centralized and subject to the single point of control and failure. In this paper, we propose a private blockchain-based solution to overcome the aforementioned challenges. We demonstrate how specifically three important telehealth services;namely, teleconsultation, drug administration, and medical testing can be enhanced using blockchain technology. Our proposed solution also ensures integrity, immutability, accountability, and non-repudiation for telehealth transactions initiated by multiple actors. For storing and keeping track of large-size digital content, such as images and audio and video recordings of telehealth service sessions, our proposed solution is integrated with off-chain storage systems including cloud storage or a decentralized storage system as that of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). The registered participants are provided with access privileges based on their roles to ensure that restrictions are enforced on-chain. Smart contracts are developed to maintain data provenance and generate reliable alerts and notifications. The implementation and testing details of the algorithms are presented. We discuss, compare, and analyze the security features of our solution.
ABSTRACT
Effectively managing the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) process is crucial for healthcare providers not only during pandemics such as COVID-19 but also in their normal operations. Despite significant advances in new technologies and treatment options providers still suffer from poor procurement, ordering, forecasting, and distribution practices. Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) are an important stakeholder in HCSC and benefit providers with cost savings, volume discounts, and vendor selection. However, the current GPO contract process is time-consuming and lacks efficiency. Hence, our proposed solution integrates blockchain technology and decentralized storage to promote transparency, streamlines communication with stakeholders, and minimize the procurement timeline while avoiding pricing discrepancies and inaccuracies. Our solution connects all the stakeholders such as manufacturer, GPO, distributor, and provider using Ethereum network. In this paper, we propose a blockchain solution using smart contracts to automate the GPO contract process. We propose a generic framework for contracting process in the HCSC with detailed algorithms depicting various interactions among HCSC stakeholders. The smart contract code was developed and tested using Remix IDE and the code is publicly shared via Github1. We discuss various security risks and present detailed cost analysis of various transactions incurred by the stakeholders. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed blockchain-based solution is economically feasible as only a minimal transaction fee is expended by the stakeholders in the distributed network. CCBY