The emergence of biomedical sensor devices, wireless communication, and innovation in other technologies for healthcare applications result in the evolution of a new area of research that is termed as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBAN originates from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which are used for implementing many healthcare systems integrated with networks and wireless devices to ensure remote healthcare monitoring. WBAN is a network of wearable devices implanted in or on the human body. The main aim of WBAN is to collect the human vital signs/physiological data (like ECG, body temperature, EMG, glucose level, etc.) round-the-clock from patients that demand secure, optimal and efficient routing techniques. The efficient, secure, and reliable designing of routing protocol is a difficult task in WBAN due to its diverse characteristic and restraints, such as energy consumption and temperature-rise of implanted sensors. The two significant constraints, overheating of nodes and energy efficiency must be taken into account while designing a reliable blockchain-enabled WBAN routing protocol. The purpose of this study is to achieve stability and efficiency in the routing of WBAN through managing temperature and energy limitations. Moreover, the blockchain provides security, transparency, and lightweight solution for the interoperability of physiological data with other medical personnel in the healthcare ecosystem. In this research work, the blockchain-based Adaptive Thermal-/Energy-Aware Routing (ATEAR) protocol for WBAN is proposed. Temperature rise, energy consumption, and throughput are the evaluation metrics considered to analyze the performance of ATEAR for data transmission. In contrast, transaction throughput, latency, and resource utilization are used to investigate the outcome of the blockchain system. Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmarking tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the blockchain system in terms of CPU utilization, memory, and memory utilization. The results show that by preserving residual energy and avoiding overheated nodes as forwarders, high throughput is achieved with the ultimate increase of the network lifetime. Castalia, a simulation tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, and its comparison is made with Multipath Ring Routing Protocol (MRRP), thermal-aware routing algorithm (TARA), and Shortest-Hop (SHR). Evaluation results illustrate that the proposed protocol performs significantly better in balancing of temperature (to avoid damaging heat effect on the body tissues) and energy consumption (to prevent the replacement of battery and to increase the embedded sensor node life) with efficient data transmission achieving a high throughput value.

In ubiquitous sensor networks (USN), sensor node localization is normally performed with global positioning system (GPS) or radio signal strength (RSS) between a target node and reference nodes. Because GPS is not available in indoor environments, RSS-based approach is commonly used for indoor localization. However, RSS-based approach is hard to be applied to real indoor environments (e.g., home) because of signal interferences with various indoor obstacles such as walls, doors, furniture, and electric appliances. In this paper, we propose an efficient indoor localization method for Zigbee sensor nodes by classifying link quality indicator (LQI) patterns between a target node and multiple reference nodes rather than using calculation with RSS values. And we also present the results of indoor localization experiments in our ubiquitous home network test bed using the proposed localization method.

The formation of abnormal cells within the brain is termed as brain tumor. Brain tumors can be benign or cancerous. Brain being the major organ of the body controls every activity we perform in our daily life. Therefore, it is important to detect any kind of abnormal growth of cells in the brain at the earliest. Deep learning methods are now being hugely used in medical image analysis. Manual detection of brain tumors by radiologists are time consuming and error prone. Therefore applying Machine Learning techniques to automatically segment tumor region and to detect is very important and necessary in advancing medical image analysis. The algorithm in this paper could automatically detect brain tumor through skull stripping method and segmentation through U-Net architecture. The algorithm has been tested on 3000 Magnetic resonance imaging images (MRI) and resulted in an accuracy of 93%. Dataset of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format brain MRI images has been used for the experimentation. The proposed method achieved mean Dice Similarity Coefficient metric of 0.82 and median Dice Similarity Coefficient metric of 0.86 for full tumor region.