Electronic health records (EHRs) are digitally saved health records that provide information about a person’s health. EHRs are generally shared among healthcare stakeholders, and thus are susceptible to power failures, data misuse, a lack of privacy, security, and an audit trail, among other problems. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a groundbreaking technology that provides a distributed and decentralized environment in which nodes in a list of networks can connect to each other without the need for a central authority. It has the potential to overcome the limits of EHR management and create a more secure, decentralized, and safer environment for exchanging EHR data. Further, blockchain is a distributed ledger on which data can be stored and shared in a cryptographically secure, validated, and mutually agreed-upon manner across all mining nodes. The blockchain stores data with a high level of integrity and robustness, and it cannot be altered. When smart contracts are used to make decisions and conduct analytics with machine-learning algorithms, the results may be trusted and unquestioned. However, Blockchain is not always indestructible and suffers from scalability and complexity issues that might render it inefficient. Combining AI and blockchain technology can handled some of the drawbacks of these two technical ecosystems effectively. AI algorithms rely on data or information to learn, analyze, and reach conclusions. The performance of AI algorithms is enhanced through the data obtained from a data repository or a reliable, secure, trustworthy, and credible platform. Researchers have identified three categories of blockchain-based potential solutions for the management of electronic health records: conceptual, prototype, and implemented. The purpose of this research work is to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify and assess research articles that were either conceptual or implemented to manage EHRs using blockchain technology. The study conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the literature on blockchain technology and enhanced health record management systems utilizing artificial intelligence technologies. The study examined 189 research papers collected from various publication categories. The in-depth analysis focuses on the privacy, security, accessibility, and scalability of publications. The SLR has illustrated that blockchain technology has the potential to deliver decentralization, security, and privacy that are frequently lacking in traditional EHRs. Additionally, the outcomes of the extensive analysis inform future researchers about the type of blockchain to use in their research. Additionally, methods used in healthcare are summarized per application area while their pros and cons are highlighted. Finally, the emphasized taxonomy combines blockchain and artificial intelligence, which enables us to analyze possible blockchain and artificial intelligence applications in health records management systems. The article ends with a discussion on open issues for research and future directions.

Breast cancer plays a significant role in affecting female mortality. Researchers are actively seeking to develop early detection methods of breast cancer. Several technologies contributed to the reduction in mortality rate from this disease, but early detection contributes most to preventing disease spread, breast amputation and death. Thermography is a promising technology for early diagnosis where thermal cameras employed are of high resolution and sensitivity. The combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with thermal images is an effective tool to detect early stage breast cancer and is foreseen to provide impressive predictability levels. This paper reviews systematically the related works employing thermography with AI highlighting their contributions and drawbacks and proposing open issues for research. Several different types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and deep learning models were used in the literature to process thermographic images of breast cancer, such as Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Probability Neural Network (PNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), ResNet50, SeResNet50, V Net, Bayes Net, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Convolutional and DeConvolutional Neural Networks (C-DCNN), VGG-16, Hybrid (ResNet-50 and V-Net), ResNet101, DenseNet and InceptionV3. Previous studies were found limited to varying the numbers of thermal images used mostly from DMR-IR database. In addition, analysis of the literature indicate that several factors do affect the performance of the Neural Network used, such as Database, optimization method, Network model and extracted features. However, due to small sample size used, most of the studies achieved a classification accuracy of 80% to 100%.

Integrating IoT devices in SCADA systems has provided efficient and improved data collection and transmission technologies. This enhancement comes with significant security challenges, exposing traditionally isolated systems to the public internet. Effective and highly reliable security devices, such as intrusion detection system (IDSs) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), are critical. Countless studies used deep learning algorithms to design an efficient IDS; however, the fundamental issue of imbalanced datasets was not fully addressed. In our research, we examined the impact of data imbalance on developing an effective SCADA-based IDS. To investigate the impact of various data balancing techniques, we chose two unbalanced datasets, the Morris power dataset, and CICIDS2017 dataset, including random sampling, one-sided selection (OSS), near-miss, SMOTE, and ADASYN. For binary classification, convolutional neural networks were coupled with long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM). The system’s effectiveness was determined by the confusion matrix, which includes evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, precision, detection rate, and F1-score. Four experiments on the two datasets demonstrate the impact of the data imbalance. This research aims to help security researchers in understanding imbalanced datasets and their impact on DL SCADA-IDS.

Wearable antennas have grown in popularity in recent years as a result of their appealing features and prospects to actualize lightweight, compact, low-cost and adaptable wireless communications and surroundings. These antennas have to be conformal and made of lightweight materials in a low-profile arrangement when attached to various parts of the human body. Near-body operation of these antennas should be possible without degradation. When these characteristics are taken into account, the layout of wearable antennas become challenging, especially when textile substrates are investigated, high conductivity materials are used during manufacturing procedures and body binding scenarios have an impact on the design’s performance. Several of these issues arise in the context of body-worn deployment, despite modest changes in magnitude between implementations. This paper examines the multiple issues and obstacles encountered in the construction of wearable antennas as well as the range of materials used, and the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) effects employed as well as the bending scheme. An overview of the innovative features and their separate approaches to addressing the difficulties lately raised by work in this field conducted by the scientific community is provided as an appendix.

Edge computing (EC) is a distributed computing approach to processing data at the network edge, either by the device or a local server, instead of centralized data centers or the cloud. EC proximity to the data source can provide faster insights, response time, and bandwidth utilization. However, the distributed architecture of EC makes it vulnerable to data security breaches and diverse attack vectors. The edge paradigm has limited availability of resources like memory and battery power. Also, the heterogeneous nature of the hardware, diverse communication protocols, and difficulty in timely updating security patches exist. A significant number of researchers have presented countermeasures for the detection and mitigation of data security threats in an EC paradigm. However, an approach that differs from traditional data security and privacy-preserving mechanisms already used in cloud computing is required. Artificial Intelligence (AI) greatly improves EC security through advanced threat detection, automated responses, and optimized resource management. When combined with Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), AI further strengthens data security by leveraging PUFs’ unique and unclonable attributes alongside AI’s adaptive and efficient management features. This paper investigates various edge security strategies and cutting-edge solutions. It presents a comparison between existing strategies, highlighting their benefits and limitations. Additionally, the paper offers a detailed discussion of EC security threats, including their characteristics and the classification of different attack types. The paper also provides an overview of the security and privacy needs of the EC, detailing the technological methods employed to address threats. Its goal is to assist future researchers in pinpointing potential research opportunities.

Prediction accuracy of rain attenuation on short-range millimetre-waves terrestrial links is of the utmost importance for signal strength prediction and link budget of 5G systems and beyond. This letter contributes to the prediction of rain attenuation over millimetre-wave frequencies for a short-range path (less than 1 km). Interestingly, rain-induced attenuation predicted by utilizing ITU-R P.530-17 largely overestimates the measured data at 26GHz and 38 GHz with 300 m path length in Malaysia. This is due to the inclusion of the distance factor, which ranges between 2.5 (f = 38 GHz) to 2.54 (26GHz). The behaviour of the distance factor is investigated thoroughly and found the maximum values of the distance factor inconsistent for the path lengths less than 1 km. Consequently, a modification for the distance factor r in ITU-R P530.17 has been proposed. The rain attenuation data measured are utilized to validate and improve the proposed modifications. In addition, available rain attenuation measurements at 25 GHz for 223 m path length in Japan and 75 GHz for 100 m path length in Korea are also utilized for validation. Subsequently, several available measurements from different locations are used to validate the accuracy of the proposed model and found good agreement.