The rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed enormous challenges to the global public health system. To deal with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the more accurate and convenient diagnosis of patients needs to be developed. This paper proposes a deep-learning-based COVID-19 detection method and evaluates its performance on embedded edge-computing devices. By adding an attention module and mixed loss into the original VGG19 model, the method can effectively reduce the parameters of the model and increase the classification accuracy. The improved model was first trained and tested on the PC X86 GPU platform using a large dataset (COVIDx CT-2A) and a medium dataset (integrated CT scan); the weight parameters of the model were reduced by around six times compared to the original model, but it still approximately achieved 98.80%and 97.84% accuracy, outperforming most existing methods. The trained model was subsequently transferred to embedded NVIDIA Jetson devices (TX2, Nano), where it achieved 97% accuracy at a 0.6−1 FPS inference speed using the NVIDIA TensorRT engine. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is practicable and convenient; it can be used on a low-cost medical edge-computing terminal. The source code is available on GitHub for researchers.

The concept of Big Data is popular in a variety of domains. The purpose of this review was to summarize the features, applications, analysis approaches, and challenges of Big Data in health care. Big Data in health care has its own features, such as heterogeneity, incompleteness, timeliness and longevity, privacy, and ownership. These features bring a series of challenges for data storage, mining, and sharing to promote health-related research. To deal with these challenges, analysis approaches focusing on Big Data in health care need to be developed and laws and regulations for making use of Big Data in health care need to be enacted. From a patient perspective, application of Big Data analysis could bring about improved treatment and lower costs. In addition to patients, government, hospitals, and research institutions could also benefit from the Big Data in health care.

In the current electronic industry, embedded systems have become essential components in most electronic devices. The fast growth mobile devices have been used in every sector and brought wide applications in many aspects of our society. These devices involve in internet connections, wireless communications and even cloud computing, which increases the necessity of both hardware and software securities. Therefore there is an urgent need of efficient education in EE, CE and CS in embedded systems, especially in hardware and software co-design with the concepts of modern security methods. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress development of an effective learning tool which benefits from active learning concepts and modern mobile technologies. The contributions of this tool on promoting engineering students' learning of embedded system designs and security are also investigated.