Nowadays, the use of mobile devices in the healthcare sector is increasing significantly. Mobile technologies offer not only forms of communication for multimedia content (e.g. clinical audio-visual notes and medical records) but also promising solutions for people who desire the detection, monitoring and treatment of their health conditions anywhere and at any time. Mobile health systems can contribute to make patient care faster, better and cheaper. Several pathological conditions can benefit from the use of mobile technologies. In this work we focus on dysphonia, an alteration of the voice quality that affects about one person in three at least once in his/her lifetime. Voice disorders are rapidly spreading, although they are often underestimated. Mobile health systems can be an easy and fast support to voice pathology detection. The identification of an algorithm that discriminates between pathological and healthy voices with more accuracy is necessary to realise a valid and precise mobile health system. The key contribution of this study is to investigate and compare the performance of several machine learning techniques useful for voice pathology detection. All analyses are performed on a dataset of voices selected from the Saarbruecken Voice Database. The results obtained are evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and ROC area. They show that the best accuracy in voice diseases detection is achieved by the Support Vector Machine algorithm or the Decision Tree one, depending on the features evaluated by using opportune feature selection methods.

Video summarization (VS) has attracted intense attention recently due to its enormous applications in various computer vision domains, such as video retrieval, indexing, and browsing. Traditional VS researches mostly target at the effectiveness of the VS algorithms by introducing the high quality of features and clusters for selecting representative visual elements. Due to the increased density of vision sensors network, there is a tradeoff between the processing time of the VS methods with reasonable and representative quality of the generated summaries. It is a challenging task to generate a video summary of significant importance while fulfilling the needs of Internet of Things (IoT) surveillance networks with constrained resources. This article addresses this problem by proposing a new computationally effective solution through designing a deep CNN framework with hierarchical weighted fusion for the summarization of surveillance videos captured in IoT settings. The first stage of our framework designs discriminative rich features extracted from deep CNNs for shot segmentation. Then, we employ image memorability predicted from a fine-tuned CNN model in the framework, along with aesthetic and entropy features to maintain the interestingness and diversity of the summary. Third, a hierarchical weighted fusion mechanism is proposed to produce an aggregated score for the effective computation of the extracted features. Finally, an attention curve is constituted using the aggregated score for deciding outstanding keyframes for the final video summary. Experiments are conducted using benchmark data sets for validating the importance and effectiveness of our framework, which outperforms the other state-of-the-art schemes.

The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest global health emergencies of the last few decades with indelible consequences for all societies throughout the world. The cost in terms of human lives lost is devastating on account of the high contagiousness and mortality rate of the virus. Millions of people have been infected, frequently requiring continuous assistance and monitoring. Smart healthcare technologies and Artificial Intelligence algorithms constitute promising solutions useful not only for the monitoring of patient care but also in order to support the early diagnosis, prevention and evaluation of Covid-19 in a faster and more accurate way. On the other hand, the necessity to realise reliable and precise smart healthcare solutions, able to acquire and process voice signals by means of appropriate Internet of Things devices in real-time, requires the identification of algorithms able to discriminate accurately between pathological and healthy subjects. In this paper, we explore and compare the performance of the main machine learning techniques in terms of their ability to correctly detect Covid-19 disorders through voice analysis. Several studies report, in fact, significant effects of this virus on voice production due to the considerable impairment of the respiratory apparatus. Vocal folds oscillations that are more asynchronous, asymmetrical and restricted are observed during phonation in Covid-19 patients. Voice sounds selected by the Coswara database, an available crowd-sourced database, have been e analysed and processed to evaluate the capacity of the main ML techniques to distinguish between healthy and pathological voices. All the analyses have been evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score and Receiver Operating Characteristic area. These show the reliability of the Support Vector Machine algorithm to detect the Covid-19 infections, achieving an accuracy equal to about 97%.

Advancements in wearable medical devices using the IoT technology are shaping the modern healthcare system. With the emergence of the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT), efficient healthcare services can be provided to patients. Healthcare professionals have effectively used AI-based models to analyze the data collected from IoHT devices to treat various diseases. Data must be processed and analyzed while avoiding privacy breaches, in compliance with legal rules and regulations, such as the HIPAA and GDPR. Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning-based approach allowing multiple entities to train an ML model collaboratively without sharing their data. It is particularly beneficial in healthcare, where data privacy and security are substantial concerns. Even though FL addresses some privacy concerns, there is still no formal proof of privacy guarantees for IoHT data. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are tools and techniques designed to enhance the privacy and security of online communications and data sharing. PETs provide a range of features that help protect users’ personal information and sensitive data from unauthorized access and tracking. This paper comprehensively reviews PETs concerning FL in the IoHT scenario and identifies several key challenges for future research.