Recent advancements in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) have ushered in the wide adoption of IoT devices in our daily health management. For IoHT data to be acceptable by stakeholders, applications that incorporate the IoHT must have a provision for data provenance, in addition to the accuracy, security, integrity, and quality of data. To protect the privacy and security of IoHT data, federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) have been proposed, where private IoHT data can be trained at the owner’s premises. Recent advancements in hardware GPUs even allow the FL process within smartphone or edge devices having the IoHT attached to their edge nodes. Although some of the privacy concerns of IoHT data are addressed by FL, fully decentralized FL is still a challenge due to the lack of training capability at all federated nodes, the scarcity of high-quality training datasets, the provenance of training data, and the authentication required for each FL node. In this paper, we present a lightweight hybrid FL framework in which blockchain smart contracts manage the edge training plan, trust management, and authentication of participating federated nodes, the distribution of global or locally trained models, the reputation of edge nodes and their uploaded datasets or models. The framework also supports the full encryption of a dataset, the model training, and the inferencing process. Each federated edge node performs additive encryption, while the blockchain uses multiplicative encryption to aggregate the updated model parameters. To support the full privacy and anonymization of the IoHT data, the framework supports lightweight DP. This framework was tested with several deep learning applications designed for clinical trials with COVID-19 patients. We present here the detailed design, implementation, and test results, which demonstrate strong potential for wider adoption of IoHT-based health management in a secure way.

Medical IoT devices are rapidly becoming part of management ecosystems for pandemics such as COVID-19. Existing research shows that deep learning (DL) algorithms have been successfully used by researchers to identify COVID-19 phenomena from raw data obtained from medical IoT devices. Some examples of IoT technology are radiological media such as CT scanning and X-ray images, body temperature measurement using thermal cameras, safe social distancing identification using live face detection, and face mask detection from camera images. However, researchers have identified several security vulnerabilities in DL algorithms to adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we have tested a number of COVID-19 diagnostic methods that rely on DL algorithms with relevant adversarial examples. Our test results show that DL models that do not consider defensive models against adversarial perturbations remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Finally, we present in detail the adversarial example generation process, implementation of the attack model, and the perturbations of existing DL-based COVID-19 diagnostic applications. We hope that this work will raise awareness of adversarial attacks and encourages others to safeguard DL models from attacks on healthcare systems.

Capturing psychological, emotional, and physiological states, especially during a pandemic, and leveraging the captured sensory data within the pandemic management ecosystem is challenging. Recent advancements for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) have shown promising results from collecting diversified types of such emotional and physical health-related data from the home environment. State-of-the-art deep learning (DL) applications can run in a resource-constrained edge environment, which allows data from IoMT devices to be processed locally at the edge, and performs inferencing related to in-home health. This allows health data to remain in the vicinity of the user edge while ensuring the privacy, security, and low latency of the inferencing system. In this article, we develop an edge IoMT system that uses DL to detect diversified types of health-related COVID-19 symptoms and generates reports and alerts that can be used for medical decision support. Several COVID-19 applications have been developed, tested, and deployed to support clinical trials. We present the design of the framework, a description of our implemented system, and the accuracy results. The test results show the suitability of the system for in-home health management during a pandemic.

The capacity and coverage requirements for 5 th generation (5G) and beyond wireless connectivity will be significantly different from the predecessor networks. To meet these requirements, the anticipated deployment cost in the United Kingdom (UK) is predicted to be between £30bn and £50bn, whereas the current annual capital expenditure (CapEX) of the mobile network operators (MNOs) is £2.5bn. This prospect has vastly impacted and has become one of the major delaying factors for building the 5G physical infrastructure, whereas other areas of 5G are progressing at their speed. Due to the expensive and complicated nature of the network infrastructure and spectrum, the second-tier operators, widely known as mobile virtual network operators (MVNO), are entirely dependent on the MNOs. In this paper, an extensive study is conducted to explore the possibilities of reducing the 5G deployment cost and developing viable business models. In this regard, the potential of infrastructure, data, and spectrum sharing is thoroughly investigated. It is established that the use of existing public infrastructure (e.g., streetlights, telephone poles, etc.) has a potential to reduce the anticipated cost by about 40% to 60%. This paper also reviews the recent Ofcom initiatives to release location-based licenses of the 5G-compatible radio spectrum. Our study suggests that simplification of infrastructure and spectrum will encourage the exponential growth of scenario-specific cellular networks (e.g., private networks, community networks, micro-operators) and will potentially disrupt the current business models of telecommunication business stakeholders - specifically MNOs and TowerCos. Furthermore, the anticipated dense device connectivity in 5G will increase the resolution of traditional and non-traditional data availability significantly. This will encourage extensive data harvesting as a business opportunity and function within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as large social networks. Consequently, the rise of new infrastructures and spectrum stakeholders is anticipated. This will fuel the development of a 5G data exchange ecosystem where data transactions are deemed to be high-value business commodities. The privacy and security of such data, as well as definitions of the associated revenue models and ownership, are challenging areas - and these have yet to emerge and mature fully. In this direction, this paper proposes the development of a unified data hub with layered structured privacy and security along with blockchain and encrypted off-chain based ownership/royalty tracking. Also, a data economy-oriented business model is proposed. The study found that with the potential commodification of data and data transactions along with the low-cost physical infrastructure and spectrum, the 5G network will introduce significant disruption in the Telco business ecosystem.

Recent advancements of Industrial IoT (IIoT) have revolutionized modern urbanization and smart cities. While IIoT data contains rich events and objects of interest, processing a massive amount of IIoT data and making predictions in real-time is challenging. Recent advancements in AI allow processing such a massive amount of IIoT data and generating insights for further decision-making processes. In this paper, we propose several key aspects of AI-enabled IIoT data for smart city monitoring. Firstly, we have combined a human-intelligence-enabled crowdsourcing application with that of an AI-enabled IIoT framework to capture events and objects from IIoT data in real-time. Secondly, we have combined multiple AI algorithms that can run on distributed edge and cloud nodes to automatically categorize the captured events and objects and generate analytics, reports, and alerts from the IIoT data in real-time. The results can be utilized in two scenarios. In the first scenario, the smart city authority can authenticate the AI-processed events and assign these events to the appropriate authority for managing the events. In the second scenario, the AI algorithms are allowed to interact with humans or IIoT for further processes. Finally, we will present the implementation details of the scenarios mentioned above and the test results. The test results show that the framework has the potential to be deployed within a smart city.