ABSTRACT
As society advances, the shift from passive medical care to health management and preventive medical care has become an important issue, with the realization of wearable monitors becoming desirable. In light of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the number of patients who are in urgent need of the monitoring of biological information is increasing. This review focuses on piezoelectric materials and composites that convert kinetic energy into electrical energy to realize self‐powered wearable monitoring sensors, outlining the recent research activity on sensors for use in healthcare monitoring. First, a general description of the principles of piezoelectric monitoring sensors is given. Next, the development status of piezoelectric materials and composites aimed at the application of detecting tiny motions of the human body is introduced, and then the research trends on the detection of larger human body movements are highlighted. Finally, after presenting the performance of current piezoelectric sensors and future research guidelines for developing multifunctional systems in the post COVID‐19 era, the achievements are summarized. Overall, this review will provide guidance to researchers who are seeking to design and develop highly sensitive self‐powered piezoelectric sensors that monitor human motion and physiological signals. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Advanced Materials Technologies is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
Recently, the Healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) has been widely applied to alleviate the global challenge of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. However, security and limited energy capacity issues remain the two main factors that prevent the large-scale application of the H-IoT. Therefore, a permissioned blockchain and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-empowered H-IoT system is presented in this research to address these two issues. The proposed H-IoT system can provide real-time security and energy-efficient healthcare services to control the propagation of the COVID-19 pandemic. To address the security issue, a permissioned blockchain method is adopted to guarantee the security of the proposed H-IoT system. As for handling the limited energy constraint, we employ the mobile edge computing (MEC) method to offload the computing tasks to alleviate the computational burden and energy consumption of the proposed H-IoT system. We also adopt an energy harvesting method to improve performance. In addition, a DRL method is employed to jointly optimize both the security and energy efficiency performance of the proposed system. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution can balance the requirements of security and energy efficiency issues and hence can better respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The last two years were strongly shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distancing countermeasures. The worldwide research changed as well, focusing on the problems created or exacerbated by the novel coronavirus. The Pervasive Electromagnetics Lab of the Tor Vergata University of Rome with a great engagement of several medical engineering students focused on applying sensor-oriented RFID to improve personal safety. In particular, the sensorization of the filtering facepiece respirators (FFRs) was one of the COVID-inspired research topics. FFRs integrating RFID-based sensors were designed and tested. In this contribution, the most significant results achieved are summarized regarding humidity-sensing and cough-monitoring FFRs.
ABSTRACT
With the assistance of Internet of Things (IoT), the fast developing Healthcare Internet of Things (H-IOT) have promoted the healthcare ecosystem into the era of Health 5.0 and enables many promising medical applications, such as remote healthcare that is crucial in pandemic (e.g, COVID-19). Healthcare participants can make accurate diagnosis, treatment and research based on the shared Personal Health Records (PHRs) sensed from remote H-IOT devices. However, current H- IOT systems fall short of a secure and trustworthy PHR sharing service in remote healthcare, which is able to prevent user privacy leakage and PHR violation together with high efficiency in key distribution apart from supporting efficient data retrieval and fine-grained access control. In response, we present a blockchain- based hierarchical data sharing framework (BHDSF) to provide fine-grained access control and efficient retrieval over encrypted PHRs with low consumed hierarchical key distribution and key leakage resistance. Compared with existing solutions, BHDSF takes untrusted cloud and malicious auditor into consideration simultaneously, and achieves trustworthy PHR integrity auditing and metadata verification by leveraging blockchain technique. Besides, BHDSF enables efficiently aggregative authentication for source records from H-IoT devices, which is lacked in most of existing data sharing frameworks. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of BHDSF by conducting extensive empirical tests over real-world dataset. IEEE