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.

Many researchers have used the properties of the popular Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) to devise a stronger and faster image encryption algorithm to assure the secrecy of images during online transmission. In this paper, a robust Elliptic curve based image encryption and authentication model for both grayscale and color images has been proposed. The model uses the secure Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman(ECDH) key exchange to compute a shared session key along with the improved ElGamal encoding scheme. 3D and 4D Arnold Cat maps are used to effectively scramble and transform the values of plain image pixels. A well-structured digital signature is used to verify the authenticity of the encrypted image prior to decryption. The model produces good-quality cipher images with an average entropy of 7.9993 for grayscale and 7.99925 for the individual components of color images. The model has high average NPCR of 99.6%, average UACI of 33.3% and low correlation for both grayscale and color images. The model has low computational costs with minimized point multiplication operations. The proposed model is robust with high resilience against statistical, differential, chosen-plaintext(CPA), known-plaintext(KPA) and occlusion attacks.

Technology’s fast growth has profoundly impacted myriad areas, including healthcare. Implementing 5G networks offering high-speed and low-latency communication capabilities is one of the most promising technical developments. Parallel to this, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a robust data analysis and decision-making tool. This paper examines how 5G and AI are combined in the context of intelligent healthcare systems. T5G green communication systems must overcome several challenges to satisfy the need for more user capacity, faster network speeds, cheaper pricing, and less resource use. By applying 5G standards, data rates, and device dependability for Industry 4.0 applications may be significantly increased. Advanced security and decreased unauthenticated assaults from various platforms are also covered in the paper. An outline of prospective new technologies and security improvements was provided to safeguard 5G-based intelligent healthcare networks. This paper identifies several research issues and potential future directions for secure 5G-based smart healthcare. This article discusses Industry 4.0, 5G standards, and new research in future wireless communications to explore current research concerns related to 5G technology. A brand-new architecture is also suggested in the paper for Industry 4.0 and 5G-enabled intelligent healthcare systems.

Diabetes, a significant global health crisis, is primarily driven in India by unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles, with rapid urbanization amplifying these effects through convenience-oriented living and limited physical activity opportunities, underscoring the need for advanced preventative strategies and technology for effective management. This study integrates Shapley Additive explanations (SHAPs) into ensemble machine learning models to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diabetes predictions. By identifying the most influential features using SHAP, this study examined their role in maintaining high predictive performance while minimizing computational demands. The impact of feature selection on model accuracy was assessed across ten models using three feature sets: all features, the top three influential features, and all except these top three. Models focusing on the top three features achieved superior performance, with the ensemble model attaining a better performance in most of the metrics, outperforming comparable approaches. Notably, excluding these features led to a significant decline in performance, reinforcing their critical influence. These findings validate the effectiveness of targeted feature selection for efficient and robust clinical applications.

With the proliferation of smart grid and deregulation of the energy market, a wide variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading systems have emerged. Common challenges for designing such systems include prosumers’ privacy and security threats. To this end, Blockchain-based solutions have gained a lot of attention, though most existing solutions have either employed permissionless blockchain, which is far from pragmatic for a P2P energy trading system with peers permitted to join or leave the network at their whim; or relatively secure yet inefficient permissioned blockchains. Hence, this article presents a flexible permissioned ascription (FPA) scheme that uses on-chain and off-chain permissioning scheme via Orion and Metamask wallet. It also employs contract permissioning through a JavaScript based chain code deployed over Hyperledger Besu (an Ethereum based permissioned Blockchain network) with istanbul byzantine fault tolerant (IBFT) 2.0 consensus algorithm. Additionally, the proposed framework is emulated for development of a working prototype for a P2P energy trading system. Its performance evaluation has been conducted and monitored with Grafana, Prometheus, Hyperledger Caliper, and Kibana for parameters such as latency, throughput, success rate, CPU time, block time, block behind time, memory usage, garbage collection (GC) time, and performance of the validator nodes. The latency of IBFT 2.0 was found five times lesser than that of Ethereum and two times lesser than HF RAFT and KAFKA under varying conditions. Also, the measured throughput was 1.5 times higher than RAFT and Kafka and three times higher than that of Ethereum. The average block confirmation time measured is 5–6 s. The GC usage measured very less, i.e., 0.5–0.8%, with the proposed framework. It has been observed that the proposed energy-trading framework provides an efficient performance for deploying, transferring, and querying the energy transaction to a P2P energy-trading Blockchain network when compared with other consensus mechanisms.

As a result of the proliferation of digital and network technologies in all facets of modern society, including the healthcare systems, the widespread adoption of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) has become the norm. At the same time, Blockchain has been widely accepted as a potent solution for addressing security issues in any untrusted, distributed, decentralized application and has thus seen a slew of works on Blockchain-enabled EHRs. However, most such prototypes ignore the performance aspects of proposed designs. In this paper, a prototype for a Blockchain-based EHR has been presented that employs smart contracts with Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, which also provides a unified performance analysis with Hyperledger Caliper 0.4.2. The additional contribution of this paper lies in the use of a multi-hosted testbed for the performance analysis in addition to far more realistic Gossip-based traffic scenario analysis with Tcpdump tools. Moreover, the prototype is tested for performance with superior transaction ordering schemes such as Kafka and RAFT, unlike other literature that mostly uses SOLO for the purpose, which accounts for superior fault tolerance. All of these additional unique features make the performance evaluation presented herein much more realistic and hence adds hugely to the credibility of the results obtained. The proposed framework within the multi-host instances continues to behave more successfully with high throughput, low latency, and low utilization of resources for opening, querying, and transferring transactions into a healthcare Blockchain network. The results obtained in various rounds of evaluation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.