Search Results (502)

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become crucial across various domains, including healthcare, smart homes, and security systems, owing to the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Several Machine Learning (ML) techniques, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), have been proposed for HAR. However, they are still deficient in addressing the challenges of noisy features and insufficient data. This paper introduces a novel approach to tackle these two challenges, employing a Deep Learning (DL) Ensemble-Based Stacking Neural Network (SNN) combined with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for HAR based on ambient sensors. Our proposed deep learning ensemble-based approach outperforms traditional ML techniques and enables robust and reliable recognition of activities in real-world scenarios. Comprehensive experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets from the CASAS smart home project demonstrate that the proposed stacking framework achieves superior accuracy on five out of six datasets when compared to literature-reported state-of-the-art baselines, with improvements ranging from 3.36 to 39.21 percentage points and an average gain of 13.28 percentage points. Although the baseline marginally outperforms the proposed models on one dataset (Aruba) in terms of accuracy, this exception does not alter the overall trend of consistent performance gains across diverse environments. Statistical significance of these improvements is further confirmed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Moreover, the ASGAN-augmented models consistently improve macro-F1 performance over the corresponding baselines on five out of six datasets, while achieving comparable performance on the Milan dataset. The proposed GAN-based method further improves the activity recognition accuracy by a maximum of 4.77 percentage points, and an average of 1.28 percentage points compared to baseline models. By combining ensemble-based DL with GAN-generated synthetic data, a more robust and effective solution for ambient HAR addressing both accuracy and data imbalance challenges in real-world smart home settings is achieved. Full article

Integrating antibacterial fabrics into wearable technology represents a transformative advancement in healthcare, fashion, and personal hygiene. Antibacterial fabrics, designed to inhibit microbial growth, are gaining prominence due to their potential to reduce infections, enhance durability, and maintain cleanliness in wearable devices. These fabrics offer effective antimicrobial properties while retaining comfort and functionality by incorporating nanotechnology and advanced materials, such as silver nanoparticles, zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, and graphene. The production techniques for antibacterial textiles range from chemical and physical surface modifications to biological treatments, each tailored to achieve long-lasting antibacterial performance while preserving fabric comfort and breathability. Advanced methods such as nanoparticle embedding, sol–gel coating, electrospinning, and green synthesis approaches have shown significant promise in enhancing antibacterial efficacy and material compatibility. Wearable technology, including fitness trackers, smart clothing, and medical monitoring devices, relies on prolonged skin contact, making the prevention of bacterial colonization essential for user safety and product longevity. Antibacterial fabrics address these concerns by reducing odor, preventing skin irritation, and minimizing the risk of infection, especially in medical applications such as wound dressings and patient monitoring systems. Despite their potential, integrating antibacterial fabrics into wearable technology presents several challenges. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the key antibacterial agents, the production strategies used to fabricate antibacterial textiles, and their emerging applications in wearable technologies. It also highlights the need for interdisciplinary research to overcome current limitations and promote the development of sustainable, safe, and functional antibacterial fabrics for next-generation wearable. Full article

In the context of the rapid growth of the Internet of Things and mobile health services, sensors and smart wearable devices are continuously collecting and uploading dynamic health data. Together with the long-term accumulated electronic medical records and multi-source heterogeneous clinical data from healthcare institutions, these data form the cornerstone of intelligent healthcare. In the context of medical data sharing, previous studies have mainly focused on privacy protection and secure data transmission, while relatively few have addressed the issue of incentive mechanisms. However, relying solely on technical means is insufficient to solve the problem of individuals’ willingness to share their data. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a three-party Stackelberg-game-based incentive mechanism for medical data sharing. The mechanism captures the hierarchical interactions among the intermediator, electronic device users, and data consumers. In this framework, the intermediator acts as the leader, setting the transaction fee; electronic device users serve as the first-level followers, determining the data price; and data consumers function as the second-level followers, deciding on the purchase volume. A social network externality is incorporated into the model to reflect the diffusion effect of data demand, and the optimal strategies and system equilibrium are derived through backward induction. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed mechanism effectively enhances users’ willingness to share data and improves the overall system utility, achieving a balanced benefit among the cloud platform, electronic device users, and data consumers. This study not only enriches the game-theoretic modeling approaches to medical data sharing but also provides practical insights for designing incentive mechanisms in IoT-based healthcare systems. Full article

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors enables impactful applications in healthcare, fitness, and smart environments, but it also faces challenges related to data privacy, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data, and limited computational resources on edge devices. This study proposes an efficient and personalized federated learning (PFL) framework for HAR that integrates federated training with model compression and per-client fine-tuning to address these challenges and support deployment on resource-constrained devices (RCDs). A convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained across multiple clients using FedAvg, followed by magnitude-based pruning and float16 quantization to reduce model size. While personalization and compression have previously been studied independently, their combined application for HAR remains underexplored in federated settings. Experimental results show that the global FedAvg model experiences performance degradation under non-IID conditions, which is further amplified after pruning, whereas per-client personalization substantially improves performance by adapting the model to individual user patterns. To ensure realistic evaluation, experiments are conducted using both random and temporal data splits, with the latter mitigating temporal leakage in time-series data. Personalization consistently improves performance under both settings, while quantization reduces the model footprint by approximately 50%, enabling deployment on wearable and IoT devices. Statistical analysis using paired significance tests confirms the robustness of the observed performance gains. Overall, this work demonstrates that combining lightweight model compression with personalization providing an effective and practical solution for federated HAR, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and deployment feasibility in real-world scenarios. Full article

Asthma is a common chronic disease in children, contributing to significant morbidity and healthcare utilization worldwide. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into pediatric asthma care is rapidly advancing, offering new opportunities for early diagnosis, risk stratification, and personalized management. AI-driven tools can analyze complex clinical, genetic, and environmental data to identify asthma phenotypes and endotypes, predict exacerbations, and support timely interventions. In pediatric populations, these technologies enable non-invasive diagnostic approaches, remote monitoring through wearable devices, and improved medication adherence via smart inhalers and digital health platforms. Despite these advances, challenges remain, including the need for pediatric-specific datasets, transparency in AI decision-making, and careful attention to data privacy and equity. The integration of AI in pediatric asthma care and into the clinical decision system can offer personalized treatment plans, reducing the burden of the disease both for patients and health professionals. This is a narrative review on the applications of AI and ML in pediatric asthma care. Full article

Fog computing has revolutionized the world by providing its services close to the user premises, which results in reducing the communication latency for many real-time applications. This communication latency has been a major constraint in cloud computing and ultimately causes user dissatisfaction due to slow response time. Many real-time applications like smart transportation, smart healthcare systems, smart cities, smart farming, video surveillance, and virtual and augmented reality are delay-sensitive real-time applications and require quick response times. The response delay in certain critical healthcare applications might cause serious loss to health patients. Therefore, by leveraging fog computing, a substantial portion of healthcare-related computational tasks can be offloaded to nearby fog nodes. This localized processing significantly reduces latency and enhances system availability, making it particularly advantageous for time-sensitive and mission-critical healthcare applications. Due to close proximity to end users, fog computing is considered to be the most suitable computing platform for real-time applications. However, fog devices are resource constrained and require proper resource management techniques for efficient resource utilization. This study presents an optimized resource allocation and scheduling framework for delay-sensitive healthcare applications using a Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO) algorithm. Using the iFogSim toolkit, the proposed technique was evaluated for many extensive simulations to obtain the desired results in terms of system response time, cost of execution and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that the MPSO-based method reduces makespan by up to 8% and execution cost by up to 3% compared to existing metaheuristic algorithms, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing overall fog computing performance for healthcare systems. Full article

Healthcare professionals face numerous challenges when analyzing data and providing treatment, including determining which parameters to measure, the frequency of measurement, i.e., how frequently to measure them, and the responsibility for monitoring patient health with new medical devices. Machine learning (ML) techniques are efficient predictive models used to improve early prediction of patient care and reduce the cost of implementing healthcare systems. This study proposes a new model (data prediction and labeling using a negative feature based on a multi-agent system (PLPF-MAS)) that provides a smart city-based healthcare system for the continuous monitoring of patients’ vital signs, such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen saturation. It also predicts future states and provides suitable recommendations based on clinical events. The MIMIC-II database of the MIT physio bank archive is used, which contains 1023 patient records. Additionally, the EHR dataset is used, which contains 10,000 patient records. The models were trained and evaluated for six bio-signals. The PLPF-MAS model is distinguished from traditional methods in its advanced system, which combines the activities of several agents and the intelligent distribution of responsibilities among them. The LR agent measures the model’s reliability in parallel with the AE-HMM agent to predict the Prisk; it then sends the data to a coordinator and a supervisory agent to monitor and manage the model. Our model is characterized by strong flexibility and reliability, the ability to deal with large datasets, and a short response time. It provides recommendations and warnings about risks, and it can predict clinical states with high accuracy. The new model achieved an accuracy of 98.4%, a precision of 95.3%, a sensitivity of 99.2%, a specificity of 99.1%, an F1-Score of 97.1%, and an $R^2$ of 98%, when the MIMIC-II dataset was used. Conversely, it achieved an accuracy of 93%, a precision of 92%, a recall of 94%, an F1-Score of 93%, an AUC-ROC of 94%, and an AUC-PR of 89% when the EHR dataset was used. Full article

Wearable healthcare is shifting from passive tracking to active, closed-loop care by integrating polymeric three-dimensional (3D)-printed microneedle arrays (MNAs) with soft electronics and wireless modules. This review surveys the design, materials, and the manufacturing routes that enable skin-conformal MNA wearables for minimally invasive access to the interstitial fluid and precise but localized drug delivery. Looking ahead, the converging advances in multimaterial printing, nano/biofunctional coatings, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven control are promising “wearable clinics” that can personalize monitoring and therapy in real time, thus accelerating the translation of MNA-integrated wearables from laboratory prototypes to clinically robust, patient-centric systems. Overall, this review identifies a clear transition from proof-of-concept MNA devices toward integrated, wearable, and closed-loop therapeutic platforms. Key challenges remain in scalable manufacturing, drug dose limitations, long-term stability, and regulatory translation. Addressing these gaps through advances in hollow MNA architectures, system integration, and standardized evaluation protocols is expected to accelerate clinical adoption. However, the realization of closed-loop wearable MNA-based systems remains constrained by challenges related to power consumption, real-time data latency, and the need for robust clinical validation. Full article

In recent years, the convergence of advanced technologies has enabled real-time data access and sharing across diverse devices and networks, significantly amplifying cybersecurity risks. For organizations with digital infrastructures, network security is crucial for mitigating potential cyber-attacks. They establish security policies to protect systems and data, but employees may intentionally or unintentionally bypass these policies, rendering the network vulnerable to internal and external threats. Detecting these policy violations is challenging, requiring frequent manual system checks for compliance. This paper addresses key challenges in safeguarding digital assets against evolving threats, including rogue access points, man-in-the-middle attacks, denial-of-service (DoS) incidents, unpatched vulnerabilities, and AI-driven automated exploits. We propose a Blockchain-Enhanced Network Scanning and Monitoring (BENSAM) Framework, a multi-layered system that integrates advanced network scanning with a structured database for asset management, policy-driven vulnerability detection, and remediation planning. Key enhancements include device profiling, user activity monitoring, network forensics, intrusion detection capabilities, and multi-format report generation. By incorporating blockchain technology, and leveraging immutable ledgers and smart contracts, the framework ensures tamper-proof audit trails, decentralized verification of policy compliance, and automated real-time responses to violations such as alerts; actual device isolation is performed by external controllers like SDN or NAC systems. The research provides a detailed literature review on blockchain applications in domains like IoT, healthcare, and vehicular networks. A working prototype of the proposed BENSAM framework was developed that demonstrates end-to-end network scanning, device profiling, traffic monitoring, policy enforcement, and blockchain-based immutable logging. This implementation is publicly released and is available on GitHub. It analyzes common network vulnerabilities (e.g., open ports, remote access, and disabled firewalls), attacks (including spoofing, flooding, and DDoS), and outlines policy enforcement methods. Moreover, the framework anticipates emerging challenges from AI-driven attacks such as adversarial evasion, data poisoning, and transformer-based threats, positioning the system for the future integration of adaptive mechanisms to counter these advanced intrusions. This blockchain-enhanced approach streamlines security analysis, extends the framework for AI threat detection with improved accuracy, and reduces administrative overhead by integrating multiple security tools into a cohesive, trustworthy, reliable solution. Full article

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in safety-critical domains, such as healthcare, smart transportation, and industrial automation, demands robust solutions for data integrity, traceability, and security that surpass the capabilities of centralized databases. This paper analyzes how blockchain technology can be integrated with core IoT service functions—including data management, security, device management, group coordination, and automated billing—to enhance immutability, trust, and operational efficiency. Our analysis identifies practical use cases such as consensus-driven tamper-proof storage, role-based access control, firmware integrity verification, and automated micropayments. These use cases showcase blockchain’s potential beyond traditional data storage. Building on this, we propose a novel framework that integrates a permissioned distributed ledger with a standardized IoT service layer platform through a Blockchain Interworking Proxy Entity (BlockIPE). This proxy dynamically maps IoT service functions to smart contracts, enabling flexible data routing to conventional databases or blockchains based on the application requirements. We implement a Dockerized prototype that integrates a C-based oneM2M platform with an Ethereum-compatible permissioned ledger (implemented using Hyperledger Besu) via BlockIPE, incorporating security features such as role-based access control. For performance evaluation, we use Ganache to isolate proxy-level overhead and scalability. At the proxy level, the blockchain-integrated path achieves processing latencies (≈86 ms) comparable to, and slightly faster than, the traditional database path. Although the end-to-end latency is inherently governed by on-chain confirmation (≈0.586–1.086 s), the scalability remains high (up to 100,000 TPS). This validates that the architecture secures IoT ecosystems with manageable operational overhead. Full article

Self-powered sensors, leveraging their integrated energy harvesting–signal sensing capability, effectively overcome the bottlenecks of traditional sensors, including reliance on external power resources, high maintenance costs, and challenges in large-scale distributed deployment. As a result, they have become a major research focus in fields such as flexible electronics, smart healthcare, and human–machine interaction. This paper reviews the core technical paths of six major types of self-powered sensors developed in recent years, with particular emphasis on the working principles and innovative material applications associated with frictional charge transfer and electrostatic induction, pyroelectric polarization dynamics, hydrovoltaic interfacial streaming potentials, piezoelectric constitutive behavior, battery integration mechanism, and photovoltaic effect. By comparing representative achievements in fields closely related to self-powered sensors, it summarizes breakthroughs in key performance indicators such as sensitivity, detection range, response speed, cyclic stability, self-powering methods, and energy conversion efficiency. The applications discussed herein mainly cover several critical domains, including wearable medical and health monitoring systems, intelligent robotics and human–machine interaction, biomedical and implantable devices, as well as safety and ecological supervision. Finally, the current challenges facing self-powered sensors are outlined and future development directions are proposed, providing a reference for the technological iteration and industrial application of self-powered sensors. Full article

Smart cities generate vast multimodal data from IoT devices, surveillance systems, health monitors, and environmental monitoring infrastructure. The seamless integration and interpretation of such multimodal data is essential for intelligent decision-making and adaptive urban services. Multimodal machine learning (MML) provides a unified framework to fuse and analyze diverse sources, surpassing conventional unimodal and rule-based approaches. This review surveys the role of MML in smart city sensing across mobility, public safety, healthcare, and environmental domains, outlining key data modalities, enabling technologies and state-of-the-art fusion architectures. We analyze major methodological and deployment challenges, including data alignment, scalability, modality-specific noise, infrastructure limitations, privacy, and ethics, and identify future directions toward scalable, interpretable, and responsible MML for urban systems. This survey serves as a reference for AI researchers, urban planners, and policymakers seeking to understand, design, and deploy multimodal learning solutions for intelligent urban sensing frameworks. Full article

Smart cities seek to improve urban living by embedding advanced technologies into infrastructures, services, and governance. Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI) has emerged as a critical enabler by moving computation and learning closer to data sources, enabling real-time decision-making, improving privacy, and reducing reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the foundations, challenges, and opportunities of edge AI in smart cities. In particular, we begin with an overview of layer-wise designs for edge AI-enabled smart cities, followed by an introduction to the core components of edge AI systems, including applications, sensing data, models, and infrastructure. Then, we summarize domain-specific applications spanning manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, buildings, and environments, highlighting both the softcore (e.g., AI algorithm design) and the hardcore (e.g., edge device selection) in heterogeneous applications. Next, we analyze the sources of sensing data generation, model design strategies, and hardware infrastructure that underpin edge AI deployment. Building on these, we finally identify several open challenges and provide future research directions in this domain. Our survey outlines a future research roadmap to advance edge AI technologies, thereby supporting the development of adaptive, harmonic, and sustainable smart cities. Full article

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing is transforming healthcare by enabling real-time acquisition, processing, and exchange of sensitive patient data close to the data source. However, the distributed nature of IoT-enabled smart healthcare systems exposes them to severe security and privacy risks during health information exchange (HIE). This study proposes an edge-enabled hybrid encryption framework that combines elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), HMAC-SHA256, and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and efficient computation in healthcare communication networks. The proposed model minimizes latency and reduces cloud dependency by executing encryption and verification at the network edge. It provides the first systematic comparison of hybrid encryption configurations for edge-based HIE, evaluating CPU usage, memory consumption, and scalability across varying data volumes. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECC + HMAC-SHA256 + AES configuration achieves high encryption efficiency and strong resistance to attacks while maintaining lightweight processing suitable for edge devices. This approach provides a scalable and secure solution for protecting sensitive health data in next-generation IoT-enabled smart healthcare systems. Full article

Continuous and personalized monitoring are beneficial for patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. However, such levels of monitoring are seldom ensured by traditional models of care. This paper presents NeuroPredict, a secure edge–cloud Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) platform that addresses this problem by integrating commercial wearables and in-house sensors with cognitive and behavioral evaluations. The NeuroPredict platform links high-frequency physiological signals with periodic cognitive tests through the use of a modular architecture with lightweight device connectivity, a semantic integration layer for timestamp alignment and feature harmonization across heterogeneous streams, and multi-timescale data fusion. Its use of encrypted transport and storage, role-based access control, token-based authentication, identifier separation, and GDPR-aligned governance addresses security and privacy concerns. Moreover, the platform’s user interface was built by considering human-centered design principles and includes role-specific dashboards, alerts, and patient-facing summaries that are meant to encourage engagement and decision-making for patients and healthcare providers. Experimental evaluation demonstrated the NeuroPredict platform’s data acquisition reliability, coherence in multimodal synchronization, and correctness in role-based personalization and reporting. The NeuroPredict platform provides a smart system infrastructure for eHealth and remote monitoring in neurodegenerative care, aligned with priorities on wearables/IoMT integration, data security and privacy, interoperability, and human-centered design. Full article