The benefits of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in providing seamless healthcare to the world are at the forefront of technological advancement. However, security concerns of any IoMT systems are high since they threaten to compromise personal information of patients and can even cause health hazards. Researchers are exploring the use of various techniques to ensure a high level of security of IoMT systems. One key concern is that the computing power of any Internet of Things (IoT) device is relatively low, hence mechanisms that require low computational power are appropriate for designing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). In this research work, a blockchain IDS coalition is proposed for securing IoMT networks and devices. The blockchain ledger is compact and uses less processing resources. Additionally, the ledger requires less communication overhead. The cryptographic hashes in the suggested architecture ensure complete data secrecy and integrity between parties who are trusted and those who are untrustworthy. Peer-to-peer networks in both central and cluster networks are also included in this work for complete decentralization. The proposed model can counter various attacks, including Denial of Service (DoS), anonymity attacks, impersonation attacks, Man-In-The-Middle (MITM), and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). The proposed method achieved an F1- score as high as 100% and reported an AUC value of over 99%.

We evaluated the viability of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to trigger and personalize content in Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) in digital health. As an interaction pattern representative of context-aware computing, JITAIs are being explored for their potential to support sustainable behavior change, adapting interventions to an individual's current context and needs. Challenging traditional JITAI implementation models, which face severe scalability and flexibility limitations, we tested GPT-4 for suggesting JITAIs in the use case of heart-healthy activity in cardiac rehabilitation. Using three personas representing patients affected by CVD with varying severeness and five context sets per persona, we generated 450 JITAI decisions and messages. These were systematically evaluated against those created by 10 laypersons (LayPs) and 10 healthcare professionals (HCPs). GPT-4-generated JITAIs surpassed human-generated intervention suggestions, outperforming both LayPs and HCPs across all metrics (i.e., appropriateness, engagement, effectiveness, and professionalism). These results highlight the potential of LLMs to enhance JITAI implementations in personalized health interventions, demonstrating how generative AI could revolutionize context-aware computing.

User authentication is a necessary mechanism to communicate securely for mobile networks. Recently, Xie et al. have discussed a three-factor authentication (3FA) scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for mobile networks and claimed that it is secure even if the user's two factors are known to the attacker. However, in this paper, we cryptanalyse their scheme and find the offline password guessing and user impersonation attacks in it. We also propose a secure 3FA scheme for mobile networks using ECC by removing the weaknesses of their scheme. We show the formal security verification of the proposed scheme using the ProVerif tool. We discuss its informal security analysis to show that it is resistant to the various known attacks. We also present its performance analysis along with the related schemes in terms of computational cost and security features, and show that it offers more security features as compared to the related schemes.

The study aims to present an in-depth Sentiment Analysis (SA) grounded by the presence of emotions in the speech signals. Nowadays, all kinds of web-based applications ranging from social media platforms and video-sharing sites to e-commerce applications provide support for Human–Computer Interfaces (HCIs). These media applications allow users to share their experiences in all forms such as text, audio, video, GIF, and so on. The most natural and fundamental form of expressing oneself is through speech. Speech-Based Sentiment Analysis (SBSA) is the task of gaining insights into speech signals. It aims to classify the statement as neutral, negative, or positive. On the other hand, Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) categorizes speech signals into the following emotions: disgust, fear, sadness, anger, happiness, and neutral. It is necessary to recognize the sentiments along with the profoundness of the emotions in the speech signals. To cater to the above idea, a methodology is proposed defining a text-oriented SA model using the combination of CNN and Bi-LSTM techniques along with an embedding layer, applied to the text obtained from speech signals; achieving an accuracy of 84.49%. Also, the proposed methodology suggests an Emotion Analysis (EA) model based on the CNN technique highlighting the type of emotion present in the speech signal with an accuracy measure of 95.12%. The presented architecture can also be applied to different other domains like product review systems, video recommendation systems, education, health, security, and so on.

To investigate the contextual and temporal distribution of false positives (FPs) in a state-of-the-art deep learning (DL)-based atrial fibrillation (AF) detection algorithm when applied to an electrocardiogram (ECG) dataset collected under free-living ambulatory conditions. We hypothesize that under such conditions, the FPs detected by a DL model might have some correlations with the patient’s ambulatory contexts. First, a DL model is trained and evaluated on three public arrhythmia datasets from PhysioNet. It is ensured that the model has state-of-the-art performance on these public datasets. Thereafter, the same model is applied to a 215-days long contextualized single-channel ECG dataset collected under free-living ambulatory conditions. Through a manual examination of the model’s output, ground truth is obtained and the correlations between the patient’s ambulatory contexts and the true/false positive rate are analyzed. Nearly 62% of the segments marked as AF by the model were ≤50 seconds in length, and 99.9% of them were FPs. Among these non-trivial short segments of FPs, almost 78% were mainly associated with three specific contextual events; change in activity, change in body position (especially during the night), and sudden movement acceleration. Moreover, the number of FPs detected by the DL model are higher in female than in male participants. Finally, true positive (TP) AF segments are found more in the morning and late evening. These findings may have significant implications for the current use and future design of DL models for AF detection, and help understand the role of context information in reducing the FP rate in real-time AF detection under free-living conditions.

This article presents the design, technical implementation, and feasibility evaluation of mCardia —a context-aware, mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) collection system for longitudinal arrhythmia screening under free-living conditions. Along with ECG, mCardia also records active and passive contextual data, including patient-reported symptoms and physical activity. This contextual data can provide a more accurate understanding of what happens before, during, and after an arrhythmia event, thereby providing additional information in the diagnosis of arrhythmia. By using a plugin-based architecture for ECG and contextual sensing, mCardia is device-agnostic and can integrate with various wireless ECG devices and supports cross-platform deployment. We deployed the mCardia system in a feasibility study involving 24 patients who used the system over a two-week period. During the study, we observed high patient acceptance and compliance with a satisfactory yield of collected ECG and contextual data. The results demonstrate the high usability and feasibility of mCardia for longitudinal ambulatory monitoring under free-living conditions. The article also reports from two clinical cases, which demonstrate how a cardiologist can utilize the collected contextual data to improve the accuracy of arrhythmia analysis. Finally, the article discusses the lessons learned and the challenges found in the mCardia design and the feasibility study.

With the widespread use of smartphones and wearable health sensors, a plethora of mobile health (mHealth) applications to track well-being, run human behavioral studies, and clinical trials have emerged in recent years. However, the design, development, and deployment of mHealth applications is challenging in many ways. To address these challenges, several generic mobile sensing frameworks have been researched in the past decade. Such frameworks assist developers and researchers in reducing the complexity, time, and cost required to build and deploy health-sensing applications. The main goal of this article is to provide the reader with an overview of the state-of-the-art of health-focused generic mobile and wearable sensing frameworks. This review gives a detailed analysis of functional and non-functional features of existing frameworks, the health studies they were used in, and the stakeholders they support. Additionally, we also analyze the historical evolution, uptake, and maintenance after the initial release. Based on this analysis, we suggest new features and opportunities for future generic mHealth sensing frameworks.