Blockchain-Enabled EHR Framework for Internet of Medical Things

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers an infrastructure made of smart medical equipment and software applications for healthcare services. Through the internet, the IoMT is capable of providing remote medical diagnosis and timely health services. The patients can use their smart devices to create, store and share their electronic health records (EHR) with a variety of medical personnel including medical doctors and nurses. However, unless the underlying commination within IoMT is secured, malicious users can intercept, modify and even delete the sensitive EHR data of patients. Patients also lose full control of their EHR since most healthcare services within IoMT are constructed under a centralized platform outsourced in the cloud. Therefore, it is appealing to design a decentralized, auditable and secure EHR system that guarantees absolute access control for the patients while ensuring privacy and security. Using the features of blockchain including decentralization, auditability and immutability, we propose a secure EHR framework which is mainly maintained by the medical centers. In this framework, the patients’ EHR data are encrypted and stored in the servers of medical institutions while the corresponding hash values are kept on the blockchain. We make use of security primitives to offer authentication, integrity and confidentiality of EHR data while access control and immutability is guaranteed by the blockchain technology. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the proposed framework confirms its efficiency.     

A robust security scheme for wireless mesh enterprise networks

In this paper, we address the security challenges for wireless mesh enterprise networks (WMENs). The topology and communication characteristics of WMEN include the following: (a) deployment of the network devices are not planar, rather, devices are deployed over three-dimensional space (e.g., office buildings, shopping malls, grocery stores, etc.); (b) messages, generated/received by a mesh client, traverse through mesh routers in a multihop fashion; and (c) mesh clients, being mostly mobile in nature, may result in misbehaving or be spurious during communications. We propose a security scheme for WMEN in order to ensure that only authorized users are granted network access. Particularly, our scheme includes: (a) a deterministic key distribution technique that perfectly suits the network topology, (b) an efficient session key establishment protocol to achieve the client–router and router–router communications security, and (c) a distributed detection mechanism to identify malicious clients in the network. Analytical and simulation results are presented to verify our proposed solutions.     

Quantum-behaved bat algorithm for many-objective combined economic emission dispatch problem using cubic criterion function

In this research, a quantum computing idea based bat algorithm (QBA) is proposed to solve many-objective combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) problem. Here, CEED is represented using cubic criterion function to reduce the nonlinearities of the system. Along with economic load dispatch, emissions of SO₂, NO_x, and CO₂ are considered as separate three objectives, thus making it a four-objective (many-objective) optimization problem. A unit-wise price penalty factor is considered here to convert all the objectives into a single objective in order to compare the final results with other previously used methods like Lagrangian relaxation (LR), particle swarm optimization, and simulated annealing. QBA is applied in six-unit power generation system for four different loads. The obtained results show QBA successfully solve many-objective CEED problem with greater superiority than other methods found in the literature in terms of quality results, robustness, and computational performance. In the end of this paper, a detailed future research direction is provided based on the simulation results and its analysis. The outcome of this research demonstrates that the inclusion of quantum computing idea in metaheuristic technique provides a useful and reliable tool for solving such many-objective optimization problem.

     

A fault-tolerant structural health monitoring protocol using wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor network-based event detection approaches, when the decision is taken based on the measurements of sensors, sensor-fault and noise-related measurement error should be taken into account. Using Bayesian approach to form a judgment is problematic without additional information or assumptions (for example, the difficulty of knowing prior probabilities in practice). In making the final decision using the majority decision rule (as well as the k-out-of-n rule), measurement of every sensor is considered as fully reliable. However, due to sensor fault and environmental noise, the preciseness of all measurements may not be guaranteed in real-life applications. This paper presents a Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence-based structural health monitoring protocol using wireless sensor networks that overcome these limitations. Our proposal effectively discounts the unreliable observer’s (sensor’s) measurements. Extensive simulations show significant improvement in terms of detection accuracy as compared to other well-known approaches.