As an emerging technology, additive manufacturing (AM) is able to fabricate products with complex geometries using various materials. In particular, cyber-enabled AM systems have recently become widely applied in many real-world applications. It significantly improves the flexibility and productivity of AM but poses the system under high risks of cyber-physical attacks. For example, cyber-physical attack could maliciously tamper the product design and process parameters, which, in turn, leads to significant alteration of the desired properties in AM products. Therefore, there is an urgent need in incorporating advanced technologies to improve the cyber-physical security for the cyber-enabled AM systems. In this study, two common types of cyber-physical attacks regarding the G-code security were investigated, namely, unintended design modifications and intellectual property theft. To effectively secure the G-code against these two attacks, a new methodology is developed in this study, which consists of a novel blockchain-based data storage approach and an effective asymmetry encryption technique. The proposed method was also applied to a real-world AM case for ensuring the cyber-physical security of the face shield fabrication, which is critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the proposed methodology, malicious tampering can be accurately detected in time, and meanwhile, the risk of unauthorized access of the G-code file is greatly eliminated as well.
Advanced heart monitors, especially those enabled by the Internet of Health Things (IoHT), provide a great opportunity for continuous collection of the electrocardiogram (ECG), which contains rich information about underlying cardiac conditions. Realizing the full potential of IoHT-enabled cardiac monitoring hinges, to a great extent, on the detection of disease-induced anomalies from collected ECGs. However, challenges exist in the current literature for IoHT-based cardiac monitoring: (1) Most existing methods are based on supervised learning, which requires both normal and abnormal samples for training. This is impractical as it is generally unknown when and what kind of anomalies will occur during cardiac monitoring. (2) Furthermore, it is difficult to leverage advanced machine learning approaches for information processing of 1D ECG signals, as most of them are designed for 2D images and higher-dimensional data. To address these challenges, a new sensor-based unsupervised framework is developed for IoHT-based cardiac monitoring. First, a high-dimensional tensor is generated from the multi-channel ECG signals through the Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF). Then, multi-linear principal component analysis (MPCA) is employed to unfold the ECG tensor and delineate the disease-altered patterns. Obtained principal components are used as features for anomaly detection using machine learning models (e.g., deep support vector data description (deep SVDD)) as well as statistical control charts (e.g., Hotelling chart). The developed framework is evaluated and validated using real-world ECG datasets. Comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches, the developed framework with deep SVDD achieves superior performances in detecting abnormal ECG patterns induced by various types of cardiac disease, e.g., an F-score of 0.9771 is achieved for detecting atrial fibrillation, 0.9986 for detecting right bundle branch block, and 0.9550 for detecting ST-depression. Additionally, the developed framework with the T2 control chart facilitates personalized cycle-to-cycle monitoring with timely detected abnormal ECG patterns. The developed framework has a great potential to be implemented in IoHT-enabled cardiac monitoring and smart management of cardiac health.
Photoplethysmography (PPG) signals have been widely used for heart rate (HR) monitoring. Compared to the electrocardiogram (ECG), PPG signals can be easily collected with wearable devices such as smart watches at a lower cost. However, PPG signals are often contaminated by the motion artifact (MA) and noises, which greatly deteriorate the signal quality and pose significant challenges on HR monitoring. In this paper, a new algorithm, using the spectral subtraction and the Neural Network (NN), is developed for accurate HR tracking in the presence of MA and noises. Specifically, the spectral component of MA is estimated from the acceleration (ACC) signals and then removed from the spectra of PPG. In addition, a NN model is developed based on new features extracted from ACC signals to identify the relationship between the ACC and HR variations in consecutive time windows. Such information is further used as a reference to select the spectral peak corresponding to the actual HR. A post-processing algorithm is used to correct mis-identified HR and to improve the accuracy. The NN-based algorithm is validated using the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Cup Dataset. Our algorithm achieves an average absolute error of 1.03 beats per minutes (BPM) (standard deviation: 1.82 BPM), which outperforms previously reported works in the literature.
The advancement of sensing technology enables efficient data collection from manufacturing systems for monitoring and control. Furthermore, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and information technologies, more and more manufacturing systems become cyber-enabled, facilitating real-time data sharing and information exchange, which significantly improves the flexibility and efficiency of manufacturing systems. However, the cyber-enabled environment may pose the collected sensor data with high risks of cyber-physical attacks during the data and information sharing. Specifically, cyber-physical attacks could target the manufacturing process and/or the data transmission process to maliciously tamper the sensor data, resulting in false alarms or failures in anomaly detection in monitoring. In addition, cyber-physical attacks may also enable illegal data access without authorization and cause the leakage of key product/process information. Therefore, it becomes critical to develop an effective approach to protect data from these attacks so that the cyber-physical security of the manufacturing systems can be assured in the cyber-enabled environment. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes an integrative blockchain-enabled data protection method by leveraging camouflaged asymmetry encryption. A real-world case study that protects the cyber-physical security of collected sensor data in additive manufacturing is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that malicious tampering could be detected in a relatively short time (less than 0.05 ms), and the risk of unauthorized data access is significantly reduced as well.