A Secure and Efficient Scheme for Mutual Authentication for Integrity of Exchanged Data in IoMT

The emergence of pandemic diseases like Covid-19 in recent years has made it more important for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) environments to build contact between patients and doctors in order to control their health state. Patients will be able to send their healthcare data to the cloud server of the medical service provider in remote medical environments through sensors connected to their smart devices, such as watches or smartphones. However, patients' worries surrounding their data privacy protection are still present. In order to ensure the security and privacy of patients' healthcare data in remote medical environments, a number of different schemes have been proposed by researchers. However, these schemes have not been able to take all security requirements into account. Consequently, in this study, we have proposed a secure and effective protocol to safeguard the privacy of patients' medical data when it is sent to the server. This protocol entails two components: mutual authentication of the patient and the server of the medical service provider, as well as the integrity of the exchanged data. Also, our scheme satisfies security requirements and is resistant to well-known attacks. Following this, we used the Scyther tool to formally analyze our proposed scheme. The results showed that the scheme is secure, and in the section on performance analysis, we demonstrated that the proposed scheme performs better than comparable schemes. © 2023 IEEE.

Private Blockchain-Based AI-Envisioned Home Monitoring Framework in IoMT-Enabled COVID-19 Environment

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is a very serious health concern to the human life throughout the world. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) allows us to deploy several wearable Internet of Things-enabled smart devices in a patient's body. The deployed smart devices should then securely communicate to nearby mobile devices installed in a smart home, which then securely communicate with the associated fog server for information processing. The processed information in terms of transactions are formed as blocks and put into a private blockchain consisting of cloud servers. Since the patient's vital signs are very confidential and private, we apply the private blockchain. This article makes utilization of fog computing and blockchain technology simultaneously to come up with more secure system in an IoMT-enabled COVID-19 situation for patients' home monitoring purpose. We first discuss various phases related to development of a new fog-based private blockchain-enabled home monitoring framework. Next, we discuss how artificial intelligence-enabled big data analytics helps in analyzing and tracking the patients' information related to COVID-19 cases. Finally, a blockchain implementation has been performed to exhibit practical demonstration of the proposed blockchain system.

An Optimization of Home Delivery Services in a Stochastic Modeling with Self and Compulsory Vacation Interruption

This study presents and discusses the home delivery services in stochastic queuing-inventory modeling (SQIM). This system consists of two servers: one server manages the inventory sales processes, and the other server provides home delivery services at the doorstep of customers. Based on the Bernoulli schedule, a customer served by the first server may opt for a home delivery service. If any customer chooses the home delivery option, he hands over the purchased item for home delivery and leaves the system immediately. Otherwise, he carries the purchased item and leaves the system. When the delivery server returns to the system after the last home delivery service and finds that there are no items available for delivery, he goes on vacation. Such a vacation of a delivery server is to be interrupted compulsorily or voluntarily, according to the prefixed threshold level. The replenishment process is executed due to the (s,Q) reordering policy. The unique solution of the stationary probability vector to the finite generator matrix is found using recursive substitution and the normalizing condition. The necessary and sufficient system performance measures and the expected total cost of the system are computed. The optimal expected total cost is obtained numerically for all the parameters and shown graphically. The influence of parameters on the expected number of items that need to be delivered, the probability that the delivery server is busy, and the expected rate at which the delivery server's self and compulsory vacation interruptions are also discussed.

Blockchain-Based Trusted Federated Learning with Pre-Trained Models for COVID-19 Detection

COVID-19 is a serious epidemic that not only endangers human health, but also wreaks havoc on the development of society. Recently, there has been research on using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for COVID-19 detection. As AI has entered the era of big models, deep learning methods based on pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a focus of industrial applications. Federated learning (FL) enables the union of geographically isolated data, which can address the demands of big data for PTMs. However, the incompleteness of the healthcare system and the untrusted distribution of medical data make FL participants unreliable, and medical data also has strong privacy protection requirements. Our research aims to improve training efficiency and global model accuracy using PTMs for training in FL, reducing computation and communication. Meanwhile, we provide a secure aggregation rule using differential privacy and fully homomorphic encryption to achieve a privacy-preserving Byzantine robust federal learning scheme. In addition, we use blockchain to record the training process and we integrate a Byzantine fault tolerance consensus to further improve robustness. Finally, we conduct experiments on a publicly available dataset, and the experimental results show that our scheme is effective with privacy-preserving and robustness. The final trained models achieve better performance on the positive prediction and severe prediction tasks, with an accuracy of 85.00% and 85.06%, respectively. Thus, this indicates that our study is able to provide reliable results for COVID-19 detection.

Optimizing Video Conferencing Web Application built on WebRTC

Web RTC can provide real time capabilities for multimedia applications like voice, video and data between peers by utilizing the open standards. With the onset of covid, video conferencing has become a need of the day. Optimization of bandwidth, and other features have become the necessity. In the current work, WebRTC protocols are built upon, to improve the connection and success rate, optimize the bitrate and reduce the frame rate. This improvement is carried out without visible or audible loss of clarity in the video sessions. The Session Description Protocol is utilized to accomplish this, and this would not have been possible using WebRTC APIs alone. N-to-N connection among peers is established in an optimized manner, so that the application does not engage an intermediate server to transfer media streams which has resulted in multi-fold improvement in bandwidth performance and also maximized the number of participants, without incurring the cost for an intermediate media server. Conventionally, an intermediate media server is used to stitch streams from various senders into a single stream and then sent to the receivers. Bandwidth utilization is reduced close to 100x with good visibility in the stream. Robust web application is achieved using the TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT) server. The proposed work has addressed multiple ways of optimizing for the video conferencing using WebRTC. © 2022 IEEE.

FedCare: Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained Healthcare Devices in IoMT System

In social IoMT systems, resource-constrained devices face the challenges of limited computation, bandwidth, and privacy in the deployment of deep learning models. Federated learning (FL) is one of the solutions to user privacy and provides distributed training among several local devices. In addition, it reduces the computation and bandwidth of transferring videos to the central server in camera-based IoMT devices. In this work, we design an edge-based federated framework for such devices. In contrast to traditional methods that drop the resource-constrained stragglers in a federated round, our system provides a methodology to incorporate them. We propose a new phase in the FL algorithm, known as split learning. The stragglers train collaboratively with the nearest edge node using split learning. We test the implementation using heterogeneous computing devices that extract vital signs from videos. The results show a reduction of 3.6 h in the training time of videos using the split learning phase with respect to the traditional approach. We also evaluate the performance of the devices and system with key parameters, CPU utilization, memory consumption, and data rate. Furthermore, we achieve 87.29% and 60.26% test accuracy at the nonstragglers and stragglers, respectively, with a global accuracy of 90.32% at the server. Therefore, FedCare provides a straggler-resistant federated method for a heterogeneous system for social IoMT devices.

Device-Edge-Cloud Collaborative Acceleration Method Towards Occluded Face Recognition in High-Traffic Areas

Wearing masks can effectively inhibit the spread and damage of COVID-19. A device-edge-cloud collaborative recognition architecture is designed in this paper, and our proposed device-edge-cloud collaborative recognition acceleration method can make full use of the geographically widespread computing resources of devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters. First, we establish a hierarchical collaborative occluded face recognition model, including a lightweight occluded face detection module and a feature-enhanced elastic margin face recognition module, to achieve the accurate localization and precise recognition of occluded faces. Second, considering the responsiveness of occluded face detection services, a context-aware acceleration method is devised for collaborative occluded face recognition to minimize the service delay. Experimental results show that compared with state-of-the-art recognition models, the proposed acceleration method leveraging device-edge-cloud collaborations can effectively reduce the recognition delay by 16%while retaining the equivalent recognition accuracy. IEEE

Blockchain Meets Federated Learning in Healthcare: A Systematic Review with Challenges and Opportunities

Recently, innovations in the Internet-of-Medical- Things (IoMT), information and communication technologies, and Machine Learning (ML) have enabled smart healthcare. Pooling medical data into a centralised storage system to train a robust ML model, on the other hand, poses privacy, ownership, and regulatory challenges. Federated Learning (FL) overcomes the prior problems with a centralised aggregator server and a shared global model. However, there are two technical challenges: FL members need to be motivated to contribute their time and effort, and the centralised FL server may not accurately aggregate the global model. Therefore, combining the blockchain and FL can overcome these issues and provide high-level security and privacy for smart healthcare in a decentralised fashion. This study integrates two emerging technologies, blockchain and FL, for healthcare. We describe how blockchain-based FL plays a fundamental role in improving competent healthcare, where edge nodes manage the blockchain to avoid a single point of failure, while IoMT devices employ FL to use dispersed clinical data fully. We discuss the benefits and limitations of combining both technologies based on a content analysis approach. We emphasise three main research streams based on a systematic analysis of blockchain-empowered (i) IoMT, (ii) Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) management, and (iii) digital healthcare systems (internal consortium/secure alerting). In addition, we present a novel conceptual framework of blockchain-enabled FL for the digital healthcare environment. Finally, we highlight the challenges and future directions of combining blockchain and FL for healthcare applications. IEEE

Business Intelligence: Alternative Decision-Making Solutions on SMEs in Indonesia

In this modern and digital era, digital transformation is echoed as one of the organization's efforts to survive through Business Intelligence (BI). BI has become a buzzword even among business actors or organizations, not least for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are one of the sectors affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely the number of SME players who have lost their income and are finally forced to go out of business. BI is a combination of techniques and methods in terms of fulfilling access to information and a concise data management mechanism to be able to have a positive influence on SME business activities. It is because the strength of BI significantly impacts strategic decision-making using processing tools from Microsoft, namely SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This study aims to see the extent of BI as an alternative solution in decision-making by all SMEs in Indonesia. This research contributes to SMEs through the implementation of BI;SMEs get explicit knowledge about the factors that affect the performance of SMEs to help SMEs in making decisions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

PRISC: Privacy-Preserved Pandemic Infection Risk Computation through Cellular Enabled IoT Devices

The pandemics such as COVID-19 are worldwide health risks and result in catastrophic impacts on the global economy. To prevent the spread of pandemics, it is critical to trace the contacts between people to identify the infection chain. Nevertheless, the privacy concern is a great challenge to contact tracing. Moreover, existing contact tracing apps cannot obtain the macro-level infection risk information, e.g., the hotspots where the infection occurs, which, however, is critical to optimize healthcare planning to better control and prevent the outbreak of pandemics. In this paper, we develop a novel privacy-preserved pandemic tracing system, PRISC, to compute the infection risk through cellular-enabled IoT devices. In the PRISC system, there are three parties: a mobile network operator, a social network provider, and the health department. The physical contact records between users are obtained by the mobile network operator from the users’cellular-enabled IoT devices. The social contacts are obtained by the social network provider, while the health department has the records of pandemic patients. The three parties work together to compute a heatmap of pandemic infection risk in a region, while fully protecting the data privacy of each other. The heatmap provides both macro and micro level infection risk information to help control pandemics. The experiment results indicate that PRISC can compute an infection risk score within a couple of seconds and a few mega-bytes (MBs) communication cost, for datasets with 100,000 users. IEEE

COUNTERSAVIOR: AIoMT and IIoT-Enabled Adaptive Virus Outbreak Discovery Framework for Healthcare Informatics

In the current pandemic, global issues have caused health issues as well as economic downturns. At the beginning of every novel virus outbreak, lockdown is the best possible weapon to reduce the virus spread and save human life as the medical diagnosis followed by treatment and clinical approval takes significant time. The proposed COUNTERSAVIOR system aims at an Artificial Intelligence of Medical Things (AIoMT), and an edge line computing enabled and Big data analytics supported tracing and tracking approach that consumes global positioning system (GPS) spatiotemporal data. COUNTERSAVIOR will be a better scientific tool to handle any virus outbreak. The proposed research discovers the prospect of applying an individual's mobility to label mobility streams and forecast a virus such as COVID-19 pandemic transmission. The proposed system is the extension of the previously proposed COUNTERACT system. The proposed system can also identify the alternative saviour path concerning the confirmed subject's cross-path using GPS data to avoid the possibility of infections. In the undertaken study, dynamic meta direct and indirect transmission, meta behavior, and meta transmission saviour models are presented. In conducted experiments, the machine learning and deep learning methodologies have been used with the recorded historical location data for forecasting the behavior patterns of confirmed and suspected individuals and a robust comparative analysis is also presented. The proposed system produces a report specifying people that have been exposed to the virus and notifying users about available pandemic saviour paths. In the end, we have represented 3-D tracker movements of individuals, 3-D contact analysis of COVID-19 and suspected individuals for 24 h, forecasting and risk classification of COVID-19, suspected and safe individuals.

CoviBand - Wearable Social Distancing and Contact Tracing Device Using Signal Strength Indicator Metrics

The Covid-19 pandemic has grown to be a highly hazardous threat to the survival of most of the human race. It has not only caused prolonged stay-at-home or lockdown policies in many countries but has also been eating away from the global economy. Staying at home for long durations has affected the lives of daily wage workers tremendously and has also had negative consequences on the mental health of many. This paper aims to reduce the risk of contracting the disease when people leave their homes for essential services and during the gradual lift of the lockdown restrictions. This is achieved through a wearable device (wristband) which constantly looks for other wristbands in the vicinity using a WiFi module. This WiFi module is inbuilt into a NodeMCU Amica board and the setup is used in addition to a buzzer which sounds an alarm when two wristbands are dangerously close. In addition to the warning feature using the buzzer, the device would also store the contact history and the duration of contact on a remote server which can then be used for contact tracing in case a person is found to test positive for Covid-19. The interface of the remote server would be such that it gives a detailed list of the other wristbands that came into contact with any particular wristband. This device would also have an edge over some of the contact tracing apps as many people fear that these apps are an invasion of privacy and drain their mobile batteries quickly. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Generalizable Segmentation of COVID-19 Infection From Multi-Site Tomography Scans: A Federated Learning Framework

COVID-19-like pandemics are a major threat to the global health system that causes a lot of deaths across ages. Large-scale medical images (i.e., X-rays, computed tomography (CT)) dataset is favored to the accuracy of deep learning (DL) in the screening of COVID-19-like pneumonia. The cost, time, and efforts for acquiring and annotating, for instance, large CT datasets make it impossible to obtain large numbers of samples from a single institution. The research attentions have been moved toward sharing medical images from numerous medical institutions. However, owing to the necessity to preserve the privacy of the data of a patient, it is challenging to build a centralized dataset from many institutions, especially during the pandemic. More. The difference in the data acquisition process from one institution to another brings another challenge known as distribution heterogeneity. This paper presents a novel federated learning framework, called Federated Multi-Site COVID-19 (FEDMSCOV), for efficient, generalizable, and privacy-preserved segmentation of COVID-19 infection from multi-site data. In FEDMSCOV, a novel is local drift smoothing (LDS) module encodes the input from feature space to frequency space, aiming to suppress the modules that are not conducive to generalization. Given the smoothed local updated, FEDMSCOV presents a novel Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) scheme to resolve global shift in parameters. An adapted differential privacy method is applied to design and protect the privacy of local updates during the training. Experimental evaluation on a large-scale multi-institutional COVID-19 dataset demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed framework over competing learning approaches with statistical significance. IEEE

DEVS Model Design for Simulation Web App Deployment

The discrete-event system specification (DEVS) formalism has been recognized to be able to enable a formal and complete description of the components and subsystems of hybrid models. What is missing for accelerated adoption of DEVS-based methodology is to offer a way to design web apps to interact with a simulation model and to automatically deploy it on an online server which is remotely accessible from web app. The deployment of DEVS simulation models is the process of making models available in production where web applications, enterprise software, and APIs can consume the simulation by providing new inputs and generating outputs. This paper proposes a framework allowing one to simplify the DEVS simulation model building and deployment on the web by the modeling and simulation engineers with minimal web development knowledge. A case study on the management of COVID-19 epidemic surveillance is presented. © 2022 IEEE.

Machine Learning and Intelligent Network System based Covid 19 Health Care System

COVID-19 has lately infected a big number of people worldwide. Medical service frameworks are strained as a result of the infection. The emergency unit, which is part of the medical services area, has experienced several challenges as a result of the low data quality offered by existing ICU clinical equipment. The Internet of Things has enhanced the capability for essential information mobility in medical services in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, many of today's ideal models use IoT innovation to assess patients' well-being. As a result, executives lack understanding regarding the most effective method to apply such innovation to ICU clinical equipment. The IoT Based Paradigm for Medical Equipment Management Systems, a breakthrough IoT-based paradigm for successfully administering clinical hardware in ICUs, is introduced in this study. During the COVID-19 episode, IoT technology is used to boost the data stream between clinical hardware, executive frameworks, and ICUs, enabling the maximum level of openness and reasonableness in clinical equipment redistribution. IoT MEMS conceptual and functional features were painstakingly drawn. Using IoT MEMS expands the capacity and limits of emergency clinics, effectively easing COVID-19. It will also have a substantial impact on the nature of the data and will improve the partners' trust and transparency. © 2022 IEEE.

LASUA: A Lightweight Authentication Scheme with User Anonymity for IoT-Enabled Mobile Cloud

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) also known as on-demand computing uses cloud computing to deliver applications to mobile devices. This new computational paradigm model which plays a big part in the Internet of Things (IoT), has increased its popularity even more during Covid-19 pandemic and became a necessity when schools, businesses and hospitals must work remotely. We can access and process remote data which are stored over the cloud server in real-time by connecting to a wireless network. For accessing any cloud server, a mutual authentication and key agreement between a mobile user and a cloud server provider is required. However, existing authentication schemes for MCC fail to provide user anonymity, server anonymity and user untraceability. Therefore, we propose a Lightweight Authentication Scheme with User Anonymity (LASUA) which artfully employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), random number, time stamps, one-way hash functions, concatenation, XOR operations and fuzzy extractor for biometric to enable various security features including anonymity and resistance against various attacks. LASUA utilises the hardness of ECC to provide top-notch security with low computation and communication cost, a perfect solution for resource constrained devices. © 2022 IEEE.

A Friendly Interface Medical Service Robot with Fault-tolerant Voice Recognition and Mobile Phone Remote Control

In recent years, due to the impact of COVID-19 around the world, there has been a serious shortage of medical resources. In order to supplement the manpower and fear that medical staff's contact with patients will cause a breach in the epidemic, reduce the workload of nurses, and help nurses perform repetitive tasks so that nurses can concentrate more on the patient's condition. Therefore, this paper proposes M-Robot, which is a friendly interface service robot based on the Android system and can be controlled by voice, touch, and remote control in the medical care field. The system is mainly divided into two parts. One is the web server. The web server is divided into two parts: front-end and back-end. The front-end is responsible for friendly user interface management, and the back-end is for accessing the SQLite database, as well as processing speech recognition and semantic understanding in voice services. In the other part, we use TEMI robot to develop and complete the desired service. Its service content includes environment introduction, delivery service, questionnaire survey, broadcast car, scheduling reminder, follow-up record, and patient instruction video. In the voice control mode, the user can say the wake-up word to the robot and say the required service content, and the robot will execute after receiving the message;in the remote control mode, we provide a friendly web interface for remote control. As well as the information needed to manage various services. © 2022 IEEE.

Toward Trustworthy AI: Blockchain-Based Architecture Design for Accountability and Fairness of Federated Learning Systems

Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving AI technique where clients (i.e., organizations or devices) train models locally and formulate a global model based on the local model updates without transferring local data externally. However, federated learning systems struggle to achieve trustworthiness and embody responsible AI principles. In particular, federated learning systems face accountability and fairness challenges due to multistakeholder involvement and heterogeneity in client data distribution. To enhance the accountability and fairness of federated learning systems, we present a blockchain-based trustworthy federated learning architecture. We first design a smart contract-based data-model provenance registry to enable accountability. Additionally, we propose a weighted fair data sampler algorithm to enhance fairness in training data. We evaluate the proposed approach using a COVID-19 X-ray detection use case. The evaluation results show that the approach is feasible to enable accountability and improve fairness. The proposed algorithm can achieve better performance than the default federated learning setting in terms of the model's generalization and accuracy.

When Privacy, Distrust, and Misinformation Cause Worry About Using COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

Public health authorities worldwide are advocating for contact-tracing apps to help track COVID-19 infections during the pandemic and interrupt virus transmission. However, app users have to share their personally identifiable information, whereabouts, and in some cases, their vaccination records with authorities via mobile Internet. This situation creates grave concerns about how such personal information is transmitted, stored, archived, and disposed. In addition, the apps'technical design would also impact the adoption, such as whether the apps would drain the battery. Further, citizens'high distrust of governments also reduces app adoption. This article reviews recent research on contact-tracing apps and examines how privacy concerns, distrust in governments, and misinformation affect people's perceptions of contact-tracing apps. We recommend possible solutions for promoting these apps by analyzing what we learn from recent literature. IEEE

STRENUOUS: Edge-Line Computing, AI, and IIoT Enabled GPS Spatiotemporal Data-Based Meta-Transmission Healthcare Ecosystem for Virus Outbreaks Discovery

COVID-19 is not the last virus;there would be many others viruses we may face in the future. We already witnessed the loss of economy and daily life through the lockdown. In addition, vaccine, medication, and treatment strategies take clinical trials, so there is a need to tracking and tracing approach. Suitably, exhibiting and computing social evolution is critical for refining the epidemic, but maybe crippled by location data ineptitude of inaccessibility. It is complex and time consuming to identify and detect the chain of virus spread from one person to another through the terabytes of spatiotemporal GPS data. The proposed research aims an HPE edge line computing and big data analytic supported virus outbreak tracing and tracking approach that consumes terabytes of spatiotemporal data. The proposed STRENUOUS system discovers the prospect of applying an individual's mobility to label mobility streams and forecast a virus-like COVID-19 epidemic transmission. The method and the mechanical assembly further contained an alert component to demonstrate a suspected case if there was a potential exposure with the confirmed subject. The proposed system tracks location data related to a suspected subject in the confirmed subject route, where the location data expresses one or more geographic locations of each user over a period. It recognizes a subcategory of the suspected subject who is expected to transmit a contagion based on the location data. System measure an exposure level of a carrier to the infection based on contaminated location data and a subset of carriers connected with the second location carrier. They investigated whether the people in the confirmed subject's cross-path can be infected and suggest quarantine followed by testing. The proposed STRENUOUS system produces a report specifying that the people have been exposed to the virus.