Healthcare big data (HBD) allows medical stakeholders to analyze, access, retrieve personal and electronic health records (EHR) of patients. Mostly, the records are stored on healthcare cloud and application (HCA) servers, and thus, are subjected to end-user latency, extensive computations, single point failures, and security and privacy risks. A joint solution is required to address the issues of responsive analytics, coupled with high data ingestion in HBD and secure EHR access. Motivated from the research gaps, the paper proposes a scheme, that integrates blockchain (BC)-based confidentiality-privacy (CP) preserving scheme, CP-BDHCA, that operates in two phases. In the first phase, elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC)-based digital signature framework, HCA-ECC is proposed to establish a session key for secure communication among different healthcare entities. Then, in the second phase, a two-step authentication framework is proposed that integrates RivestShamirAdleman (RSA) and advanced encryption standard (AES), named as HCARSAE is proposed that safeguards the ecosystem against possible denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed DoS (DDoS) based attack vectors. CP-BDAHCA is compared against existing HCA cloud applications in terms of parameters like response time, average delay, transaction and signing costs, signing and verifying of mined blocks, and resistance to DoS and DDoS attacks. We consider 10 BC nodes and create a real-world customized dataset to be used with SEER dataset. The dataset has 30; 000 patient profiles, with 1000 clinical accounts. Based on the combined dataset the proposed scheme outperforms traditional schemes like AI4SAFE, TEE, Secret, and IIoTEED, with a lower response time. For example, the scheme has a very less response time of 300 ms in DDoS. The average signing cost of mined BC transactions is 3; 34 seconds, and for 205 transactions, has a signing delay of 1405 ms, with improved accuracy of 12% than conventional state-of-the-art approaches.

This paper proposes a generic scheme VaCoChain, that fuses blockchain (BC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) underlying fifth-generation (5G) communication services for timely vaccine distribution during novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and future pandemics. The scheme offers 5G-tactile internet (5G-TI)-based services for UAV communication networks (UAVCN) monitored through ground controller stations (GCs). 5G-TI enabled UAVCN supports real-time dense connectivity at ultra-low round-trip time (RTT) latency of < 1 and high availability of 99.9999%. Thus, it can support resilient vaccine distributions in a phased manner at government-designated nodal centers (NCs) with reduced round trip delays from vaccine production warehouses (VPW). Further, UAVCNs ensure minimizes human intervention and controls vaccine health conditions due to shorter trip times. Once vaccines are supplied at NCs warehouses, then the BC ensures timestamped documentation of vaccinated persons with chronology, auditability, and transparency of supply-chain checkpoints from VPW to NCs. Through smart contracts (SCs), priority groups can be formed for vaccination based on age, healthcare workers, and general commodities. In the simulation, for UAV efficacy, we have compared the scheme against fourth-generation (4G)-assisted long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) channels, and traditional logistics for round-trip time (RTT) latency, logistics, and communication costs. In the BC setup, we have compared the scheme against the existing 5G-TI delivery scheme (Gupta et al.) for processing latency, packet losses, and transaction time. For example, in communication costs, the proposed scheme achieves an average improvement of 9.13 for block meta-information. For 4000 transactions, the proposed scheme has a communication latency of 16s compared to 36s. The packet loss is significantly reduced to 2.5% using 5G-TI compared to 16% in 4G-LTE-A. The proposed scheme has a computation cost of 1.6 ms and a communication cost of 157 bytes, which indicates the proposed scheme efficacy against conventional approaches.

The object recognition concept is being widely used a result of increasing CCTV surveillance and the need for automatic object or activity detection from images or video. Increases in the use of various sensor networks have also raised the need of lightweight process frameworks. Much research has been carried out in this area, but the research scope is colossal as it deals with open-ended problems such as being able to achieve high accuracy in little time using lightweight process frameworks. Convolution Neural Networks and their variants are widely used in various computer vision activities, but most of the architectures of CNN are application-specific. There is always a need for generic architectures with better performance. This paper introduces the Dimension-Based Generic Convolution Block (DBGC), which can be used with any CNN to make the architecture generic and provide a dimension-wise selection of various height, width, and depth kernels. This single unit which uses the separable convolution concept provides multiple combinations using various dimension-based kernels. This single unit can be used for height-based, width-based, or depth-based dimensions; the same unit can even be used for height and width, width and depth, and depth and height dimensions. It can also be used for combinations involving all three dimensions of height, width, and depth. The main novelty of DBGC lies in the dimension selector block included in the proposed architecture. Proposed unoptimized kernel dimensions reduce FLOPs by around one third and also reduce the accuracy by around one half; semi-optimized kernel dimensions yield almost the same or higher accuracy with half the FLOPs of the original architecture, while optimized kernel dimensions provide 5 to 6% higher accuracy with around a 10 M reduction in FLOPs.

Detection of intrusions is a system that is competent in detecting cyber-attacks and network anomalies. A variety of strategies have been developed for IDS so far. However, there are factors that they lack in performance, creating scope for further research. The current trend shows that the Deep Learning (DL) technique has been proven better than traditional techniques for IDS. Throughout these studies, we presented a hybrid model that is a Deep Learning method called Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network using Long Short-Term Memory and Gated Recurrent Unit. Through simulations on the public dataset CICIDS2017, we have shown the model’s effectiveness. It has been noted that the suggested model successfully predicted most of the network attacks with 99.13% classification accuracy. The proposed model outperformed the Naïve Bayes classifier in terms of prediction accuracy and False Positive rate. The suggested model managed to perform well with only 58% attributes of the dataset compared to other existing classifiers. Moreover, this study also demonstrates the performance of LSTM and GRU with RNN independently.

The healthcare personals often use stored healthcare data to make crucial decisions, assess risk, and care for patients. The extraction of the required information from the saved healthcare data needs a healthcare ecosystem that can guarantee reliable data delivery. The reliability of cyber–physical data needs to be cross-examined using several sources of data of overlapping nature. The cross-examined data can be saved on blockchain and Solid PoD (SP) to preserve its reliability and privacy. Once the reliable healthcare data is stored on the blockchain and SP, the patients’ medical history can be delivered to data-operated systems to monitor, diagnose, and detect augmented healthcare anomalies. Cyber twins (CTs) combine the specific cyber–physical objects with digital tools portraying their actual settings. The creation of a live model for the delivery of healthcare services presents a novel opportunity in patient care comprising better evaluation of risk and assessment without hampering the activities of daily living. The introduction of blockchain technology can improve the notion of CTs by certifying transparency, decentralized data storage, data irreversibility, and person-to-person industrial communication. The storage and exchange of CT data in the healthcare ecosystem depend on disseminated ledgers and decentralized databases for storing and processing data to avoid single-point reliance. The present study develops an owner-centric decentralized sharing technique to fulfill the decentralized distribution of CT data.

Antenatal care and child vaccination services are adopted worldwide to reduce the risk of child mortality, maternal mortality, and burden of infectious diseases. This article examines the effect of socioeconomic factors on the utilization of antenatal care and child vaccination services in India. The generalized linear model has been used along with the Indian National Family Health Survey data for the period 2005-2006. The analysis shows that the health insurance plan has a significant effect on the use of antenatal care but not in the child vaccination. Furthermore, there is inequality in the utilization of antenatal care as well as child vaccination services and it is positively related to the wealth. The study suggests that there is a need to improve the socioeconomic status of the financially weaker section of the society for improving the use of child and maternal care services.