With the proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in every walks of the society, including healthcare services; digitization and increased sophistication have been gaining pace. With increased patient volumes recording and management of patients data digital healthcare alternatives, particularly, Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) has gained prominence. However, traditional EHR based systems are plagued by data loss risks, security and immutability consensus over health records, gapped communication among constituted hospitals, inefficient clinical data retrieval systems among others. Blockchain has been developed as a decentralized technology that holds the promise to address the aforesaid facilities in EHR based systems. This paper presents a patient-centric design of a decentralized healthcare management system with blockchain based EHR using javascript based Smart Contracts. A working prototype based on hyperledger fabric and composer technology has also been implemented that guarantees the security of proposed model. Experiments with the hyperledger caliper benchmarking tool provides performance of metrics such as latency, throughput, resource utilization and so on under varied scenarios and control parameters and the results affirm the efficacy of the proposed approach.

Advancements in Healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT) systems have created new opportunities and solutions for healthcare services, including the remote treatment and monitoring of patients. In addition, the security and privacy of personal health data must be ensured during data transfer. Security breaches in H-IoT can have serious safety and legal implications. This comprehensive review provides insights about secured data accession by employing cryptographic platforms such as H-IoT in big data, H-IoT in blockchain, H-IoT in machine learning and deep learning, H-IoT in edge computing, and H-IoT in software-defined networks. With this information, this paper reveals solutions to mitigate threats caused by different kinds of attacks. The prevailing challenges in H-IoT systems, including security and scalability challenges, real-time operating challenges, resource constraints, latency, and power consumption challenges are also addressed. We also discuss in detail the current trends in H-IoT, such as remote patient monitoring and predictive analytics. Additionally, we have explored future prospects, such as leveraging health data for informed strategic planning. A critical analysis performed by highlighting the prevailing limitations in H-IoT systems is also presented. This paper will hopefully provide future researchers with in-depth insights into the selection of appropriate cryptographic measures to adopt an energy-efficient and resource-optimized healthcare system.

Decrease in crop yield and degradation in product quality due to plant diseases such as rust and blast in pearl millet is the cause of concern for farmers and the agriculture industry. The stipulation of expert advice for disease identification is also a challenge for the farmers. The traditional techniques adopted for plant disease detection require more human intervention, are unhandy for farmers, and have a high cost of deployment, operation, and maintenance. Therefore, there is a requirement for automating plant disease detection and classification. Deep learning and IoT-based solutions are proposed in the literature for plant disease detection and classification. However, there is a huge scope to develop low-cost systems by integrating these techniques for data collection, feature visualization, and disease detection. This research aims to develop the ‘Automatic and Intelligent Data Collector and Classifier’ framework by integrating IoT and deep learning. The framework automatically collects the imagery and parametric data from the pearl millet farmland at ICAR, Mysore, India. It automatically sends the collected data to the cloud server and the Raspberry Pi. The ‘Custom-Net’ model designed as a part of this research is deployed on the cloud server. It collaborates with the Raspberry Pi to precisely predict the blast and rust diseases in pearl millet. Moreover, the Grad-CAM is employed to visualize the features extracted by the ‘Custom-Net’. Furthermore, the impact of transfer learning on the ‘Custom-Net’ and state-of-the-art models viz. Inception ResNet-V2, Inception-V3, ResNet-50, VGG-16, and VGG-19 is shown in this manuscript. Based on the experimental results, and features visualization by Grad-CAM, it is observed that the ‘Custom-Net’ extracts the relevant features and the transfer learning improves the extraction of relevant features. Additionally, the ‘Custom-Net’ model reports a classification accuracy of 98.78% that is equivalent to state-of-the-art models viz. Inception ResNet-V2, Inception-V3, ResNet-50, VGG-16, and VGG-19. Although the classification of ‘Custom-Net’ is comparable to state-of-the-art models, it is effective in reducing the training time by 86.67%. It makes the model more suitable for automating disease detection. This proves that the proposed model is effective in providing a low-cost and handy tool for farmers to improve crop yield and product quality.

With the rapid advancement of information technology, online information has been exponentially growing day by day, especially in the form of text documents such as news events, company reports, reviews on products, stocks-related reports, medical reports, tweets, and so on. Due to this, online monitoring and text mining has become a prominent task. During the past decade, significant efforts have been made on mining text documents using machine and deep learning models such as supervised, semisupervised, and unsupervised. Our area of the discussion covers state-of-the-art learning models for text mining or solving various challenging NLP (natural language processing) problems using the classification of texts. This paper summarizes several machine learning and deep learning algorithms used in text classification with their advantages and shortcomings. This paper would also help the readers understand various subtasks, along with old and recent literature, required during the process of text classification. We believe that readers would be able to find scope for further improvements in the area of text classification or to propose new techniques of text classification applicable in any domain of their interest.

Indian agriculture is striving to achieve sustainable intensification, the system aiming to increase agricultural yield per unit area without harming natural resources and the ecosystem. Modern farming employs technology to improve productivity. Early and accurate analysis and diagnosis of plant disease is very helpful in reducing plant diseases and improving plant health and food crop productivity. Plant disease experts are not available in remote areas thus there is a requirement of automatic low-cost, approachable and reliable solutions to identify the plant diseases without the laboratory inspection and expert's opinion. Deep learning-based computer vision techniques like Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and traditional machine learning-based image classification approaches are being applied to identify plant diseases. In this paper, the CNN model is proposed for the classification of rice and potato plant leaf diseases. Rice leaves are diagnosed with bacterial blight, blast, brown spot and tungro diseases. Potato leaf images are classified into three classes: healthy leaves, early blight and late blight diseases. Rice leaf dataset with 5932 images and 1500 potato leaf images are used in the study. The proposed CNN model was able to learn hidden patterns from the raw images and classify rice images with 99.58% accuracy and potato leaves with 97.66% accuracy. The results demonstrate that the proposed CNN model performed better when compared with other machine learning image classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree and Random Forest.