The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals used in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The ECG signals can capture the heart’s rhythmic irregularities, commonly known as arrhythmias. A careful study of ECG signals is crucial for precise diagnoses of patients’ acute and chronic heart conditions. In this study, we propose a two-dimensional (2-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model for the classification of ECG signals into eight classes; namely, normal beat, premature ventricular contraction beat, paced beat, right bundle branch block beat, left bundle branch block beat, atrial premature contraction beat, ventricular flutter wave beat, and ventricular escape beat. The one-dimensional ECG time series signals are transformed into 2-D spectrograms through short-time Fourier transform. The 2-D CNN model consisting of four convolutional layers and four pooling layers is designed for extracting robust features from the input spectrograms. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on a publicly available MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. We achieved a state-of-the-art average classification accuracy of 99.11%, which is better than those of recently reported results in classifying similar types of arrhythmias. The performance is significant in other indices as well, including sensitivity and specificity, which indicates the success of the proposed method.

Recent advancements in human-computer interaction research have led to the possibility of emotional communication via brain-computer interface systems for patients with neuropsychiatric disorders or disabilities. In this paper, we efficiently recognize emotional states by analyzing the features of electroencephalography (EEG) signals, which are generated from EEG sensors that noninvasively measure the electrical activity of neurons inside the human brain, and select the optimal combination of these features for recognition. In this paper, the scalp EEG data of 21 healthy subjects (12-14 years old) were recorded using a 14-channel EEG machine while the subjects watched images with four types of emotional stimuli (happy, calm, sad, or scared). After preprocessing, the Hjorth parameters (activity, mobility, and complexity) were used to measure the signal activity of the time series data. We selected the optimal EEG features using a balanced one-way ANOVA after calculating the Hjorth parameters for different frequency ranges. Features selected by this statistical method outperformed univariate and multivariate features. The optimal features were further processed for emotion classification using support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, linear discriminant analysis, Naive Bayes, random forest, deep learning, and four ensembles methods (bagging, boosting, stacking, and voting). The results show that the proposed method substantially improves the emotion recognition rate with respect to the commonly used spectral power band method.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals play a vital role in diagnosing and monitoring patients suffering from various cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). This research aims to develop a robust algorithm that can accurately classify the electrocardiogram signal even in the presence of environmental noise. A one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) with two convolutional layers, two down-sampling layers, and a fully connected layer is proposed in this work. The same 1D data was transformed into two-dimensional (2D) images to improve the model’s classification accuracy. Then, we applied the 2D CNN model consisting of input and output layers, three 2D-convolutional layers, three down-sampling layers, and a fully connected layer. The classification accuracy of 97.38% and 99.02% is achieved with the proposed 1D and 2D model when tested on the publicly available Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database. Both proposed 1D and 2D CNN models outperformed the corresponding state-of-the-art classification algorithms for the same data, which validates the proposed models’ effectiveness.

The development of vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as E-Transport, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality are growing progressively. The mobility aware services and network-based security are fundamental requirements of these applications. However, multi-side offloading enabling blockchain and cost-efficient scheduling in heterogeneous vehicular fog cloud nodes network become a challenging task. The study formulates this problem as a convex optimization problem, where all constraints are the convex set. The goal of the study is to minimize communication cost and computation cost of applications under mobility, security, deadline, and resource constraints. Initially, we propose a novel vehicular fog cloud network (VFCN) which consists of different components and heterogeneous computing nodes. The ensure mobility privacy, the study devises Mobility Aware Blockchain-Enabled offloading scheme (MABOS). It extends blockchain enable multi-side offloading (e.g., offline offloading and online offloading) with proof of work (PoW), proof of creditability (PoC) and fault-tolerant techniques. The purpose is to offload all tasks under the secure network without any violation. Furthermore, to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) of applications, this work suggests linear search based task scheduling (LSBTS) method, which maps all tasks onto appropriate computing nodes. The experimental results show that devise schemes outperform all existing baseline approaches to the considered problem.

Affective computing research field is growing in large scale with the frequent development of human-computer applications. These applications use information of mental or affective conditions of desired subjects to train their brain responses. Facial impressions, text physiology, vocal and other information about the subjects are used in the classification algorithms. However, the classification frameworks for EEG brain signals have been used infrequently due to the lack of a complete theoretical framework. Therefore, we present here an analysis of two different classification methods which are SVM and KNN. Four different types of emotional stimulus were presented to each subject. After preprocessing of raw EEG data, we employed Hjorth parameters for feature extraction of all EEG channels at each epoch. Five male subjects were selected in this experiment. Our results show that the emotion recognition from EEG brain signals might be possible.