Multidisciplinary topics in education pose a major challenge for traditional learning and teaching methods. Such topics can deter students from selecting particular courses or hinder their study progress. This study focused on the subject of medicinal chemistry, which is a discipline combining medicine and chemistry. This combination of applied and basic science creates a complex field of education that is challenging to both teach and learn. Chemical and pharmacological principles are typically presented in 2D molecular structures and, recently, 3D molecular models have been utilized to improve the visualization of chemical compounds and their chemical interactions. Contemporary studies have presented Virtual Reality (VR) as an alternative method for improving the learning and teaching of multidisciplinary specialties such as this. However, current educational efforts employing VR offer limited interactivity and a traditional teaching method previously presented in 2D. This reduces students’ interest and concentration in the taught subjects. This paper presents the development rationale of a novel VR educational application based on the evaluation of the user requirements by 405 pharmacy undergraduate students. The results informed the development and preliminary evaluation of a proposed VR serious game application, which was deployed in a real-life class environment and evaluated in contrast to traditional teaching methods by 15 students. The derived results confirmed the advantages of VR technology as a learning and teaching tool, in addition to the end-users’ willingness to adopt VR systems as a learning aid.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an application-specific extension of the generalized Internet of Things (IoT) to ensure reliable communication among devices $C_{i}$ , designed for the medical industry. However, a challenging issue associated with these networks, i.e., IoMT and IoT, is to ensure the authenticity of both source and destination modules and further guarantee the integrity of the multimodal data in the emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Various mechanisms for device authentication have been presented in the literature to resolve both devices and data’s authenticity, integrity, and privacy. Still, authentication of mobile device-to-server (in both homogeneous and heterogeneous IoMT) is not explicitly addressed for the black-hole attack. In this article, a device-to-server and vice versa mutual authentication scheme are presented to ensure secure communication sessions among numerous mobile devices $C_{i}$ and server $S_{j}$ in the operational IoMT. The proposed scheme is a hybrid of medium access control (MAC) and enhanced on-demand vector (EAODV)-enabled routing schemes. In the proposed scheme, an offline phase is introduced to complete the registration process of member devices with the concerned server module. It blocks every possible entry of the potential intruder devices $A_{k}$ in the operational IoMT. A mobile device $C_{i}$ interested in initiating a communication session with a particular server $S_{j}$ is needed to pass the mutual authentication process. As a result, only registered devices $C_{i}$ are allowed to communicate. Additionally, a reliable encryption and decryption scheme is used to ensure data reliability during these communication sessions. Simulation results verify the exceptional performance of the proposed mutual authentication scheme in terms of authenticity, security, and integrity of both devices and data in the operational IoMT.

Difficulty in understanding the feelings and behavior of other people is considered one of the main symptoms of autism. Computer technology has increasingly been used in interventions with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), especially augmented reality, to either treat or alleviate ASD symptomatology. Augmented reality is an engaging type of technology that helps children interact easily and understand and remember information, and it is not limited to one age group or level of education. This study utilized AR to display faces with six different basic facial expressions—happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, and anger—to help children to recognize facial features and associate facial expressions with a simultaneous human condition. The most important point of this system is that children can interact with the system in a friendly and safe way. Additionally, our results showed the system enhanced social interactions, talking, and facial expressions for both autistic and typical children. Therefore, AR might have a significant upcoming role in talking about the therapeutic necessities of children with ASD. This paper presents evidence for the feasibility of one of the specialized AR systems.