Blockchain is a shared distributed digital ledger technology that can better facilitate data management, provenance and security, and has the potential to transform healthcare. Importantly, ...blockchain represents a data architecture, whose application goes far beyond Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain and has popularized the technology. In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as 'revolutionary' and 'disruptive', is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is 'fit-for-purpose' is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.
A cognitive radio wireless sensor network is one of the candidate areas where cognitive techniques can be used for opportunistic spectrum access. Research in this area is still in its infancy, but it ...is progressing rapidly. The aim of this study is to classify the existing literature of this fast emerging application area of cognitive radio wireless sensor networks, highlight the key research that has already been undertaken, and indicate open problems. This paper describes the advantages of cognitive radio wireless sensor networks, the difference between ad hoc cognitive radio networks, wireless sensor networks, and cognitive radio wireless sensor networks, potential application areas of cognitive radio wireless sensor networks, challenges and research trend in cognitive radio wireless sensor networks. The sensing schemes suited for cognitive radio wireless sensor networks scenarios are discussed with an emphasis on cooperation and spectrum access methods that ensure the availability of the required QoS. Finally, this paper lists several open research challenges aimed at drawing the attention of the readers toward the important issues that need to be addressed before the vision of completely autonomous cognitive radio wireless sensor networks can be realized.
The drive for higher performance in optical fiber systems has renewed interest in coherent detection. We review detection methods, including noncoherent, differentially coherent, and coherent ...detection, as well as a hybrid method. We compare modulation methods encoding information in various degrees of freedom (DOF). Polarization-multiplexed quadrature-amplitude modulation maximizes spectral efficiency and power efficiency, by utilizing all four available DOF, the two field quadratures in the two polarizations. Dual-polarization homodyne or heterodyne downconversion are linear processes that can fully recover the received signal field in these four DOF. When downconverted signals are sampled at the Nyquist rate, compensation of transmission impairments can be performed using digital signal processing (DSP). Linear impairments, including chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion, can be compensated quasi-exactly using finite impulse response filters. Some nonlinear impairments, such as intra-channel four-wave mixing and nonlinear phase noise, can be compensated partially. Carrier phase recovery can be performed using feedforward methods, even when phase-locked loops may fail due to delay constraints. DSP-based compensation enables a receiver to adapt to time-varying impairments, and facilitates use of advanced forward-error-correction codes. We discuss both single- and multi-carrier system implementations. For a given modulation format, using coherent detection, they offer fundamentally the same spectral efficiency and power efficiency, but may differ in practice, because of different impairments and implementation details. With anticipated advances in analog-to-digital converters and integrated circuit technology, DSP-based coherent receivers at bit rates up to 100 Gbit/s should become practical within the next few years.
In this paper, the analysis of recent advances in genetic algorithms is discussed. The genetic algorithms of great interest in research community are selected for analysis. This review will help the ...new and demanding researchers to provide the wider vision of genetic algorithms. The well-known algorithms and their implementation are presented with their pros and cons. The genetic operators and their usages are discussed with the aim of facilitating new researchers. The different research domains involved in genetic algorithms are covered. The future research directions in the area of genetic operators, fitness function and hybrid algorithms are discussed. This structured review will be helpful for research and graduate teaching.
Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for wireless sensor networks, where patients can be monitored using wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Current WMSN healthcare ...research trends focus on patient reliable communication, patient mobility, and energy-efficient routing, as a few examples. However, deploying new technologies in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a paramount requirement of healthcare applications, especially in the case of patient privacy, if the patient has an embarrassing disease. This paper discusses the security and privacy issues in healthcare application using WMSNs. We highlight some popular healthcare projects using wireless medical sensor networks, and discuss their security. Our aim is to instigate discussion on these critical issues since the success of healthcare application depends directly on patient security and privacy, for ethic as well as legal reasons. In addition, we discuss the issues with existing security mechanisms, and sketch out the important security requirements for such applications. In addition, the paper reviews existing schemes that have been recently proposed to provide security solutions in wireless healthcare scenarios. Finally, the paper ends up with a summary of open security research issues that need to be explored for future healthcare applications using WMSNs.
Topic modeling is one of the most powerful techniques in text mining for data mining, latent data discovery, and finding relationships among data and text documents. Researchers have published many ...articles in the field of topic modeling and applied in various fields such as software engineering, political science, medical and linguistic science, etc. There are various methods for topic modelling; Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one of the most popular in this field. Researchers have proposed various models based on the LDA in topic modeling. According to previous work, this paper will be very useful and valuable for introducing LDA approaches in topic modeling. In this paper, we investigated highly scholarly articles (between 2003 to 2016) related to topic modeling based on LDA to discover the research development, current trends and intellectual structure of topic modeling. In addition, we summarize challenges and introduce famous tools and datasets in topic modeling based on LDA.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an important technology that supports daily social life and economic activities. It contributes greatly to the sustainable growth of Japan’s economy and solves various ...social problems. In recent years, AI has attracted attention as a key for growth in developed countries such as Europe and the United States and developing countries such as China and India. The attention has been focused mainly on developing new artificial intelligence information communication technology (ICT) and robot technology (RT). Although recently developed AI technology certainly excels in extracting certain patterns, there are many limitations. Most ICT models are overly dependent on big data, lack a self-idea function, and are complicated. In this paper, rather than merely developing next-generation artificial intelligence technology, we aim to develop a new concept of general-purpose intelligence cognition technology called “Beyond AI”. Specifically, we plan to develop an intelligent learning model called “Brain Intelligence (BI)” that generates new ideas about events without having experienced them by using artificial life with an imagine function. We will also conduct demonstrations of the developed BI intelligence learning model on automatic driving, precision medical care, and industrial robots.
With the widespread application of mobile edge computing (MEC), MEC is serving as a bridge to narrow the gaps between medical staff and patients. Relatedly, MEC is also moving toward supervising ...individual health in an automatic and intelligent manner. One of the main MEC technologies in healthcare monitoring systems is human activity recognition (HAR). Built-in multifunctional sensors make smartphones a ubiquitous platform for acquiring and analyzing data, thus making it possible for smartphones to perform HAR. The task of recognizing human activity using a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer has been well resolved, but in practice, with the multimodal and high-dimensional sensor data, these traditional methods fail to identify complicated and real-time human activities. This paper designs a smartphone inertial accelerometer-based architecture for HAR. When the participants perform typical daily activities, the smartphone collects the sensory data sequence, extracts the high-efficiency features from the original data, and then obtains the user’s physical behavior data through multiple three-axis accelerometers. The data are preprocessed by denoising, normalization and segmentation to extract valuable feature vectors. In addition, a real-time human activity classification method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, which uses a CNN for local feature extraction. Finally, CNN, LSTM, BLSTM, MLP and SVM models are utilized on the UCI and Pamap2 datasets. We explore how to train deep learning methods and demonstrate how the proposed method outperforms the others on two large public datasets: UCI and Pamap2.
Recent developments in the area of micro-sensor devices have accelerated advances in the sensor networks field leading to many new protocols specifically designed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). ...Wireless sensor networks with hundreds to thousands of sensor nodes can gather information from an unattended location and transmit the gathered data to a particular user, depending on the application. These sensor nodes have some constraints due to their limited energy, storage capacity and computing power. Data are routed from one node to other using different routing protocols. There are a number of routing protocols for wireless sensor networks. In this review article, we discuss the architecture of wireless sensor networks. Further, we categorize the routing protocols according to some key factors and summarize their mode of operation. Finally, we provide a comparative study on these various protocols.
As one key enabler of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) has received remarkable interest from academia and industry. The emerging vehicular applications and ...the exponential growing data have naturally led to the increased needs of communication, computation and storage resources, and also to strict performance requirements on response time and network bandwidth. In order to deal with these challenges, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is regarded as a promising solution. MEC pushes powerful computational and storage capacities from the remote cloud to the edge of networks in close proximity of vehicular users, which enables low latency and reduced bandwidth consumption. Driven by the benefits of MEC, many efforts have been devoted to integrating vehicular networks into MEC, thereby forming a novel paradigm named as Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of state-of-art research on VEC. First of all, we provide an overview of VEC, including the introduction, architecture, key enablers, advantages, challenges as well as several attractive application scenarios. Then, we describe several typical research topics where VEC is applied. After that, we present a careful literature review on existing research work in VEC by classification. Finally, we identify open research issues and discuss future research directions.
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