Given the ubiquity of handwritten documents in human transactions, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of documents have invaluable practical worth. Optical character recognition is a science that ...enables to translate various types of documents or images into analyzable, editable and searchable data. During last decade, researchers have used artificial intelligence / machine learning tools to automatically analyze handwritten and printed documents in order to convert them into electronic format. The objective of this review paper is to summarize research that has been conducted on character recognition of handwritten documents and to provide research directions. In this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) we collected, synthesized and analyzed research articles on the topic of handwritten OCR (and closely related topics) which were published between year 2000 to 2019. We followed widely used electronic databases by following pre-defined review protocol. Articles were searched using keywords, forward reference searching and backward reference searching in order to search all the articles related to the topic. After carefully following study selection process 176 articles were selected for this SLR. This review article serves the purpose of presenting state of the art results and techniques on OCR and also provide research directions by highlighting research gaps.
The advent of blockchain technology can refine the concept of DTs by ensuring transparency, decentralized data storage, data immutability, and peer-to-peer communication in industrial sectors. A DT ...is an integrated multiphysics, multiscale, and probabilistic simulation, representation, and mirroring of a real-world physical component. The DTs help to visualize designs in 3D, perform tests and simulations virtually prior to creation of any physical component, and consequently play a vital role in sustaining and maintaining Industry 4.0. It is anticipated that DTs will become prevalent in the foreseeable future because they can be used for configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. This article envisages how blockchain can reshape and transform DTs to bring about secure manufacturing that guarantees traceability, compliance, authenticity, quality, and safety. We discuss several benefits of employing blockchain in DTs. We taxonomize the DTs literature based on key parameters (e.g., DTs levels, design phases, industrial use cases, key objectives, enabling technologies, and core applications). We provide insights into ongoing progress made towards DTs by presenting recent synergies and case studies. Finally, we discuss open challenges that serve as future research directions.
•Highlight reasons why pharma industry needs blockchain drug traceability solution.•Hyperledger Fabric enabled drug traceability system (Medledger) is presented.•Chaincodes are created & deployed to ...enforce rules for storing state information.•Algorithms demonstrate supply chain functions among stakeholders in Medledger.•Sequence diagrams describe sequence of events between participating stakeholders.•Blockchain related implementation challenges are identified, enumerated & discussed.
Counterfeit drugs are one of the most severe threats to the pharmaceutical industry. World Health Organization (WHO) highlights that nearly 1035% of the drugs, i.e., one out of ten medicines produced in the least developing countries, are counterfeit and have serious side effects on human lives. The upsurge in online and Internet-based pharmacies has made the safety and security of the drug supply chain process more intricate and complicated. This research proposes a new and novel track and trace blockchain-enabled Medledger system that leverages the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform using chaincodes (smart contracts). The proposed Medledger system helps to efficiently and securely execute drug supply chain transactions in a fabric enabled private permissioned distributed network of different pharmaceutical stakeholders. Our proposed traceability solution diminishes the need for a trusted centralized authority, intermediaries and provides transaction records, enhancing efficiency and safety with high integrity, reliability, and security that reduces the likelihood of meddling with stored data on the Medledger. Chaincodes are designed, coded, and implemented using sequence diagrams to govern and control the interaction amongst the participating stakeholders in the drug supply chain ecosystem. The proposed system perpetually stores and records all activities, events, and transactions on the blockchain's immutable Medledger linked with peer-to-peer decentralized file systems such as IPFS, Swarm, filecoin, etc. for storing and providing maximum transparency and traceability. We provide an insight into some of the ongoing implementation challenges for the hyperledger fabric platform. Finally, we discuss open challenges that serve as future research directions to improve the drug traceability solutions further.
Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically form a temporary network without the reliance of any infrastructure or central administration. Energy ...consumption is considered as one of the major limitations in MANET, as the mobile nodes do not possess permanent power supply and have to rely on batteries, thus reducing network lifetime as batteries get exhausted very quickly as nodes move and change their positions rapidly across MANET. This paper highlights the energy consumption in MANET by applying the fitness function technique to optimize the energy consumption in ad hoc on demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) routing protocol. The proposed protocol is called AOMDV with the fitness function (FF-AOMDV). The fitness function is used to find the optimal path from source node to destination node to reduce the energy consumption in multipath routing. The performance of the proposed FF-AOMDV protocol has been evaluated by using network simulator version 2, where the performance was compared with AOMDV and ad hoc on demand multipath routing with life maximization (AOMR-LM) protocols, the two most popular protocols proposed in this area. The comparison was evaluated based on energy consumption, throughput, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, network lifetime and routing overhead ratio performance metrics, varying the node speed, packet size, and simulation time. The results clearly demonstrate that the proposed FF-AOMDV outperformed AOMDV and AOMR-LM under majority of the network performance metrics and parameters.
Pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) consists of multiple stakeholders including raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, regulatory authorities, pharmacies, hospitals, and patients. The ...complexity of product and transaction flows in PSC requires an effective traceability system to determine the current and all previous product ownerships. In addition, digitizing track and trace process provides significant benefit for regulatory oversight and ensures product safety. Blockchain-based drug traceability offers a potential solution to create a distributed shared data platform for an immutable, trustworthy, accountable and transparent system in the PSC. In this paper, we present an overview of product traceability issues in the PSC and envisage how blockchain technology can provide effective provenance, track and trace solution to mitigate counterfeit medications. We propose two potential blockchain based decentralized architectures, Hyperledger Fabric and Besu to meet critical requirements for drug traceability such as privacy, trust, transparency, security, authorization and authentication, and scalability. We propose, discuss, and compare two potential blockchain architectures for drug traceability. We identify and discuss several open research challenges related to the application of blockchain technology for drug traceability. The proposed blockchain architectures provide a valuable roadmap for Health Informatics researchers to build and deploy an end-to-end solution for the pharmaceutical industry.
The concept of smart city architecture requires a comprehensive solution that can combine real-time response applications for cyber-physical systems. However, the architecture faces challenges that ...can obstruct the operations in terms of systems, processes, and data flow as far as the breach risk is concerned. Though the field has been researched with the existence of centralized and distributed architectures to support smart cities. Research gaps regarding security concerns, platform assistance, and resource management continue to persist. This research article presents a novel blockchain-based architecture that proposes expansion in the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to cater to the expansion of IoT-enabled smart assets. It enables NFTs to employ fog computing for all users and smart devices connected to a fog node in a cyber-physical system. The proposed expansion suggested in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for IoT assets representation in a cyber-physical system, provides devices and user identification and authentication functionality. The proposed NFT architecture has been designed to provide a smart city solution for cyber-physical systems that ensures robust security features (such as CIA) by introducing new attributes and functions for Owner, User, Fog, and IoT device/s authentication. The validation and rigor of the security services, efficiency, and latency have been achieved by deployments on private and public ledgers. The efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the suggested functions and components have been evaluated in terms of evaluation cost and time complexity which resulted in promising results, obtained and validated on a testnet. The evaluation cost for the devised mint component was approximately 81%, and devised approve() was approximately 23% more efficient than other solutions.
Smart devices have become an essential part of the architectures such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and Internet of Everything (IoE). In contrast, these ...architectures constitute a system to realize the concept of smart cities and, ultimately, a smart planet. The adoption of these smart devices expands to different cyber-physical systems in smart city architecture, i.e., smart houses, smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart grid, smart agriculture, etc. The edge of the network connects these smart devices (sensors, aggregators, and actuators) that can operate in the physical environment and collects the data, which is further used to make an informed decision through actuation. Here, the security of these devices is immensely important, specifically from an authentication standpoint, as in the case of unauthenticated/malicious assets, the whole infrastructure would be at stake. We provide an updated review of authentication mechanisms by categorizing centralized and distributed architectures. We discuss the security issues regarding the authentication of these IoT-enabled smart devices. We evaluate and analyze the study of the proposed literature schemes that pose authentication challenges in terms of computational costs, communication overheads, and models applied to attain robustness. Hence, lightweight solutions in managing, maintaining, processing, and storing authentication data of IoT-enabled assets are an urgent need. From an integration perspective, cloud computing has provided strong support. In contrast, decentralized ledger technology, i.e., blockchain, light-weight cryptosystems, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions, are the areas with much more to explore. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges, which will eventually help address the ambiguities for improvement.
The metaverse, an emergent interconnected network that harmoniously merges digital and physical realities, represents a revolutionary paradigm in the computing realm, engendering a nexus of ...immersive, interactive experiences through user avatars. This new digital landscape, forged by the advancement of immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality, coupled with the sophistication of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and edge computing, presents diverse prospects from innovative experiential creations to the resolution of complex issues like remote work and virtual social engagement, to remote surgeries, immersive learning and so on. Nevertheless, it confronts obstacles, including privacy, security, equitable access, and ethical concerns, necessitating the construction of robust legal and ethical frameworks for the common good. This research, a comprehensive examination of this burgeoning phenomenon, systematically scrutinizes its underpinning constructs and trailblazing applications via databases such as ScienceDirect, ResearchGate, and IEEE Xplore. It uncovers the metaverse's incarnations in gaming, social platforms, education, and healthcare, signifying its transformative capacity across these sectors. The exploration underscores the imminent requirement of addressing legal and ethical dimensions as we move towards this novel digital existence, thereby paving the way for future research to architect a secure, efficient, and inclusive metaverse.
WBANs (Wireless Body Area Networks) are frequently depicted as a paradigm shift in healthcare from traditional to modern E-Healthcare. The vitals of the patient signs by the sensors are highly ...sensitive, secret, and vulnerable to numerous adversarial attacks. Since WBANs is a real-world application of the healthcare system, it's vital to ensure that the data acquired by the WBANs sensors is secure and not accessible to unauthorized parties or security hazards. As a result, effective signcryption security solutions are required for the WBANs' success and widespread use. Over the last two decades, researchers have proposed a slew of signcryption security solutions to achieve this goal. The lack of a clear and unified study in terms of signcryption solutions can offer a bird's eye view of WBANs. Based on the most recent signcryption papers, we analyzed WBAN's communication architecture, security requirements, and the primary problems in WBANs to meet the aforementioned objectives. This survey also includes the most up to date signcryption security techniques in WBANs environments. By identifying and comparing all available signcryption techniques in the WBANs sector, the study will aid the academic community in understanding security problems and causes. The goal of this survey is to provide a comparative review of the existing signcryption security solutions and to analyze the previously indicated solution given for WBANs. A multi-criteria decision-making approach is used for a comparative examination of the existing signcryption solutions. Furthermore, the survey also highlights some of the public research issues that researchers must face to develop the security features of WBANs.
Nowadays, healthcare is the prime need of every human being in the world, and clinical datasets play an important role in developing an intelligent healthcare system for monitoring the health of ...people. Mostly, the real-world datasets are inherently class imbalanced, clinical datasets also suffer from this imbalance problem, and the imbalanced class distributions pose several issues in the training of classifiers. Consequently, classifiers suffer from low accuracy, precision, recall, and a high degree of misclassification, etc. We performed a brief literature review on the class imbalanced learning scenario. This study carries the empirical performance evaluation of six classifiers, namely Decision Tree, k-Nearest Neighbor, Logistic regression, Artificial Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Gaussian Naïve Bayes, over five imbalanced clinical datasets, Breast Cancer Disease, Coronary Heart Disease, Indian Liver Patient, Pima Indians Diabetes Database, and Coronary Kidney Disease, with respect to seven different class balancing techniques, namely Undersampling, Random oversampling, SMOTE, ADASYN, SVM-SMOTE, SMOTEEN, and SMOTETOMEK. In addition to this, the appropriate explanations for the superiority of the classifiers as well as data-balancing techniques are also explored. Furthermore, we discuss the possible recommendations on how to tackle the class imbalanced datasets while training the different supervised machine learning methods. Result analysis demonstrates that SMOTEEN balancing method often performed better over all the other six data-balancing techniques with all six classifiers and for all five clinical datasets. Except for SMOTEEN, all other six balancing techniques almost had equal performance but moderately lesser performance than SMOTEEN.
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