Blockchain, a form of distributed ledger technology has attracted the interests of stakeholders across several sectors including healthcare. Its’ potential in the multi-stakeholder operated sector like health has been responsible for several investments, studies, and implementations. Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems traditionally used for the exchange of health information amongst healthcare stakeholders have been criticised for centralising power, failures and attack-points with exchange data custodians. EHRs have struggled in the face of multi-stakeholder and system requirements while adhering to security, privacy, ethical and other regulatory constraints. Blockchain is promising amongst others to address the many EHR challenges, primarily trustless and secure exchange of health information amongst stakeholders. Many blockchain-in-healthcare frameworks have been proposed; some prototyped and/or implemented. This study leveraged the PRISMA framework to systematically search and evaluate the different models proposed; prototyped and/or implemented. The bibliometric and functional distribution of all 143 articles from this study were presented. This study evaluated 61 articles that discussed either prototypes or pilot or implementations. The technical and architectural analysis of these 61 articles for privacy, security, cost, and performance were detailed. Blockchain was found to solve the trust, security and privacy constraints of traditional EHRs often at significant performance, storage and cost trade-offs.

Automated digital contact tracing is effective and efficient, and one of the non-pharmaceutical complementary approaches to mitigate and manage the epidemics like Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Despite the advantages of digital contact tracing, it is not widely used in the western world, including the US and Europe, due to strict privacy regulations and patient rights. We categorized the current approaches for contact tracing, namely: mobile service-provider-application, mobile network operators’ call detail, citizen-application, and IoT-based. Current measures for infection control and tracing do not include animals and moving objects like cars despite evidence that these moving objects can be infection carriers. In this paper, we designed and presented a novel privacy anonymous IoT model. We presented an RFID proof-of-concept for this model. Our model leverages blockchain’s trust-oriented decentralization for on-chain data logging and retrieval. Our model solution will allow moving objects to receive or send notifications when they are close to a flagged, probable, or confirmed diseased case, or flagged place or object. We implemented and presented three prototype blockchain smart contracts for our model. We then simulated contract deployments and execution of functions. We presented the cost differentials. Our simulation results show less than one-second deployment and call time for smart contracts, though, in real life, it can be up to 25 seconds on Ethereum public blockchain. Our simulation results also show that it costs an average of $1.95 to deploy our prototype smart contracts, and an average of $0.34 to call our functions. Our model will make it easy to identify clusters of infection contacts and help deliver a notification for mass isolation while preserving individual privacy. Furthermore, it can be used to understand better human connectivity, model similar other infection spread network, and develop public policies to control the spread of COVID-19 while preparing for future epidemics.

This work proposes a novel multivariate-multiscale approach for computing the spectral and temporal entropies from the multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. This facilitates the recognition of three human emotions: positive, neutral, and negative. The proposed approach is based on the application of the Fourier-Bessel series expansion based empirical wavelet transform (FBSE-EWT). We have extended the existing FBSE-EWT method for multichannel signals and derived FBSE-EWT based multivariate Hilbert marginal spectrum (MHMS) for computing spectral Shannon and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) entropies. The multivariate FBSE-EWT decomposes the multichannel EEG signals into narrow band subband signals. The multiscaling operation adapted in the spectral domain is based on the selection of successive joint instantaneous amplitude and frequency functions of the subband signals. On the other hand, the time domain multiscale K-NN entropy is computed from the cumulatively added multidimensional subband signals. The extracted spectral and temporal entropy features are smoothed and fed to the sparse autoencoder based random forest (ARF) classifier architecture for emotion classification. The proposed approach is tested using multichannel EEG signals available in a public database (SJTU emotion EEG dataset (SEED)). The bivariate EEG signals from different channel pairs with distinct spatial locations over the scalp are considered as input to our proposed system. The obtained overall classification accuracy of 94.4% reveals that the proposed approach is useful in classifying human emotions. The method is also validated using DREAMER emotion EEG public database. The method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods evaluated in these databases.

According to various worldwide statistics, most car accidents occur solely due to human error. The person driving a car needs to be alert, especially when travelling through high traffic volumes that permit high-speed transit since a slight distraction can cause a fatal accident. Even though semi-automated checks, such as speed detecting cameras and speed barriers, are deployed, controlling human errors is an arduous task. The key causes of driver’s distraction include drunken driving, conversing with co-passengers, fatigue, and operating gadgets while driving. If these distractions are accurately predicted, the drivers can be alerted through an alarm system. Further, this research develops a deep convolutional neural network (deep CNN) models for predicting the reason behind the driver’s distraction. The deep CNN models are trained using numerous images of distracted drivers. The performance of deep CNN models, namely the VGG16, ResNet, and Xception network, is assessed based on the evaluation metrics, such as the precision score, the recall/sensitivity score, the F1 score, and the specificity score. The ResNet model outperformed all other models as the best detection model for predicting and accurately determining the drivers’ activities.

Drought is the least understood natural disaster due to the complex relationship of multiple contributory factors. Its beginning and end are hard to gauge, and they can last for months or even for years. India has faced many droughts in the last few decades. Predicting future droughts is vital for framing drought management plans to sustain natural resources. The data-driven modelling for forecasting the metrological time series prediction is becoming more powerful and flexible with computational intelligence techniques. Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated success in the drought prediction process and are becoming popular to predict the weather, especially the minimum temperature using backpropagation algorithms. The favourite ML techniques for weather forecasting include singular vector machines (SVM), support vector regression, random forest, decision tree, logistic regression, Naive Bayes, linear regression, gradient boosting tree, k-nearest neighbours (KNN), the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, the feed-forward neural networks, Markovian chain, Bayesian network, hidden Markov models, and autoregressive moving averages, evolutionary algorithms, deep learning and many more. This paper presents a recent review of the literature using ML in drought prediction, the drought indices, dataset, and performance metrics.