Toward Improved Data Quality in Public Health: Analysis of Anomaly Detection Tools applied to HIV/AIDS Data in Africa

The study examined the data quality efficiency of the WHO Data QualityReview (DQR) toolkit and PyCaret anomaly detection algorithms. The tools were applied to the African HIV/AIDS data (2015-2021) extracted from a public data repository (data.pepfar.gov). The research outcome suggests that unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms could complement the efficiency of the WHO DQRtoolkit and improve Data Quality Assessment (DQA). In particular, the study showed that anomaly detection algorithms through python programming provide a more straightforward and more reliable process for detecting data inconsistencies, incompleteness, and timeliness and appears more accurate than the WHO tool. Consequently, the study contributed to ongoing debates on improving health data quality in low-income African countrie

Next-Gen Security: Leveraging Advanced Technologies for Social Medical Public Healthcare Resilience

The healthcare industry is undergoing a significant change as it incorporates advanced technologies to strengthen its security infrastructure and improve its ability to withstand current challenges and  explores the important overlap between security, technology, and public health. The introductory section presents a thorough overview, highlighting the current status of public healthcare and emphasizing the crucial importance of security in protecting confidential medical data. This statement highlights the current difficulties encountered by social medical public healthcare systems and emphasizes the urgent need to utilize advanced technologies to strengthen their ability to adapt and recover. The systematic literature review explores a wide range of studies, providing insight into the various aspects of healthcare security. This text examines conventional security methods, exposes their constraints, and advances the discussion by examining cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Biometric Security Solutions. Every technology is carefully examined to determine its ability to strengthen healthcare systems against cyber threats and breaches, guaranteeing the confidentiality and accuracy of patient data. The methodology section provides a clear explanation of the research design, the process of selecting participants, and the strategies used for analyzing the data. The research seeks to evaluate the present security situation and determine the best methods for incorporating advanced technologies into healthcare systems, using either qualitative or quantitative methods. The following sections elucidate the security challenges inherent in social medical public healthcare, encompassing cyber threats and privacy concerns. Drawing on case studies, the paper illustrates successful implementations of advanced technologies in healthcare security, distilling valuable lessons and best practices. The recommendations section goes beyond the technical domain, exploring the policy implications and strategies for technological implementation. The exploration of regulatory frameworks, legal considerations, and ethical dimensions is conducted to provide guidance for the smooth integration of advanced technologies into healthcare systems. Healthcare professionals are encouraged to participate in training and awareness programs to ensure a comprehensive and efficient implementation. To summarize, the paper combines the results, highlighting the importance of utilizing advanced technologies to strengthen the security framework of social medical public healthcare. The significance of healthcare resilience is emphasized, and potential areas for future research are delineated. This research is an important resource that offers valuable insights and guidance for stakeholders, policymakers, and technologists who are dealing with the intricate field of healthcare security in the age of advanced technologies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52710/seejph.48

A Review of Service Quality in Integrated Networking System at the Hospital Scenarios

Hospital networking system is progressing into a more unified method by connecting technology that utilizes wireless networking technologies into backbone networks. Even though multiple joined circumstances have been acknowledged in the published articles, a common medical facility has not been thoroughly studied and continued to be a difficult subject that is pending. The main challenge faced by networking consultants is the smooth unification of all the components in an all-in-one of healthcare delivery system.  A perfect understanding of the functions of the unified networking is essential for effective designing and utilization of such knowledge in the medical backgrounds. This paper denotes the design and review of unified networking system circumstances in a hospital background. The effect of the types of traffic for example the audio and visual, system loads, size and strength of the network line is studied by a test run. Three pilot test studies have been conducted in radiology A&E and ICU conditions. Each condition shows the requirements for a particular type of traffic which then becomes the definite system behaviour. In the case of a radiology requirement, email and FTP traffic are noted to function effectively within the regular-to-big networking systems. In an A&E situation, VoIP circulations create very little jitters and missing data; it is linked with the prerequisites of QoS. In ICU situations, the video conferencing function downgrades the size of the network. Therefore, a QoS enabled gadget is suggested to minimise the packet delay and data losses. This study gives an overall explanation of wireless telemedicine technology and QoS. The findings of this study are summarised and arranged. Besides, the quality of service which has to be studied through the wireless telemedicine technology has been indicated. The findings of this study will provide a useful perspective in the investigation of QoS in wireless telemedicine technology and serve as a foundation for any individuals who are intrigued in the research of “wireless telemedicine technology for e-healthcare service

Disease diagnosis in smart healthcare: Innovation, technologies and applications

To promote sustainable development, the smart city implies a global vision that merges artificial intelligence, big data, decision making, information and communication technology (ICT), and the internet-of-things (IoT). The ageing issue is an aspect that researchers, companies and government should devote efforts in developing smart healthcare innovative technology and applications. In this paper, the topic of disease diagnosis in smart healthcare is reviewed. Typical emerging optimization algorithms and machine learning algorithms are summarized. Evolutionary optimization, stochastic optimization and combinatorial optimization are covered. Owning to the fact that there are plenty of applications in healthcare, four applications in the field of diseases diagnosis (which also list in the top 10 causes of global death in 2015), namely cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and tuberculosis, are considered. In addition, challenges in the deployment of disease diagnosis in healthcare have been discussed

Real-Time Detection of Demand Manipulation Attacks on a Power Grid

An increased usage in IoT devices across the globe has posed a threat to the power grid. When an attacker has access to multiple IoT devices within the same geographical location, they can possibly disrupt the power grid by regulating a botnet of high-wattage IoT devices. Based on the time and situation of the attack, an adversary needs access to a fixed number of IoT devices to synchronously switch on/off all of them, resulting in an imbalance between the supply and demand. When the frequency of the power generators drops below a threshold value, it can lead to the generators tripping and potentially failing. Attacks such as these can cause an imbalance in the grid frequency, line failures and cascades, can disrupt a black start or increase the operating cost. The challenge lies in early detection of abnormal demand peaks in a large section of the power grid from the power operator’s side, as it only takes seconds to cause a generator failure before any action could be taken. Anomaly detection comes handy to flag the power operator of an anomalous behavior while such an attack is taking place. However, it is difficult to detect anomalies especially when such attacks are taking place obscurely and for prolonged time periods. With this motive, we compare different anomaly detection systems in terms of detecting these anomalies collectively. We generate attack data using real-world power consumption data across multiple apartments to assess the performance of various prediction-based detection techniques as well as commercial detection applications and observe the cases when the attacks were not detected. Using static thresholds for the detection process does not reliably detect attacks when they are performed in different times of the year and also lets the attacker exploit the system to create the attack obscurely. To combat the effects of using static thresholds, we propose a novel dynamic thresholding mechanism, which improves the attack detection reaching up to 100% detection rate, when used with prediction-based anomaly score techniques

Efficient Actor Recovery Paradigm For Wireless Sensor And Actor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming widely used worldwide. Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) represent a special category of WSNs wherein actors and sensors collaborate to perform specific tasks. WSANs have become one of the most preeminent emerging type of WSNs. Sensors with nodes having limited power resources are responsible for sensing and transmitting events to actor nodes. Actors are high-performance nodes equipped with rich resources that have the ability to collect, process, transmit data and perform various actions. WSANs have a unique architecture that distinguishes them from WSNs. Due to the characteristics of WSANs, numerous challenges arise. Determining the importance of factors usually depends on the application requirements. The actor nodes are the spine of WSANs that collaborate to perform the specific tasks in an unsubstantiated and uneven environment. Thus, there is a possibility of high failure rate in such unfriendly scenarios due to several factors such as power fatigue of devices, electronic circuit failure, software errors in nodes or physical impairment of the actor nodes and inter-actor connectivity problem. It is essential to keep inter-actor connectivity in order to insure network connectivity. Thus, it is extremely important to discover the failure of a cut-vertex actor and network-disjoint in order to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS). For network recovery process from actor node failure, optimal re-localization and coordination techniques should take place. In this work, we propose an efficient actor recovery (EAR) paradigm to guarantee the contention-free traffic-forwarding capacity. The EAR paradigm consists of Node Monitoring and Critical Node Detection (NMCND) algorithm that monitors the activities of the nodes to determine the critical node. In addition, it replaces the critical node with backup node prior to complete node-failure which helps balances the network performance. The packet is handled using Network Integration and Message Forwarding (NIMF) algorithm that determines the source of forwarding the packets (Either from actor or sensor). This decision-making capability of the algorithm controls the packet forwarding rate to maintain the network for longer time. Furthermore, for handling the proper routing strategy, Priority-Based Routing for Node Failure Avoidance (PRNFA) algorithm is deployed to decide the priority of the packets to be forwarded based on the significance of information available in the packet. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed EAR paradigm, we compare the performance of our proposed work with state-of the art localization algorithms. Our experimental results show superior performance in regards to network life, residual energy, reliability, sensor/ actor recovery time and data recovery

A Reconfigurable and wearable wireless sensor system and its case study in the training of hammer throwers

Wearable sensors have been popularly used in many applications with the development of computer science and engineering. However, wearables for biomechanical feedback in motor learning and training are still rare. Therefore, this thesis focuses on developing an efficient and cost-effective wireless sensor system through a case study on the hammer throw. The results have shown that the proposed reconfigurable and wearable system can implement real-time biomechanical feedback in the hammer-throw training. Furthermore, the experimental results suggest that various throw-control patterns could be identified by using one tension-sensor and two inertial measurement units (i.e., more superior practicality than 3D motion capture), indicating that the low-cost wearable system has potential to substitute the expensive 3D motion capture technology. The proposed system can be easily modified and applied to many other applications, including but not limited to healthcare, rehabilitation, and smart homes, etc.National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC

Application of Hierarchical Temporal Memory to Anomaly Detection of Vital Signs for Ambient Assisted Living

This thesis presents the development of a framework for anomaly detection of vital signs for an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) health monitoring scenario. It is driven by spatiotemporal reasoning of vital signs that Cortical Learning Algorithms (CLA) based on Hierarchal Temporal Memory (HTM) theory undertakes in an AAL health monitoring scenario to detect anomalous data points preceding cardiac arrest. This thesis begins with a literature review on the existing Ambient intelligence (AmI) paradigm, AAL technologies and anomaly detection algorithms used in a health monitoring scenario. The research revealed the significance of the temporal and spatial reasoning in the vital signs monitoring as the spatiotemporal patterns of vital signs provide a basis to detect irregularities in the health status of elderly people. The HTM theory is yet to be adequately deployed in an AAL health monitoring scenario. Hence HTM theory, network and core operations of the CLA are explored. Despite the fact that standard implementation of the HTM theory comprises of a single-level hierarchy, multiple vital signs, specifically the correlation between them is not sufficiently considered. This insufficiency is of particular significance considering that vital signs are correlated in time and space, which are used in the health monitoring applications for diagnosis and prognosis tasks. This research proposes a novel framework consisting of multi-level HTM networks. The lower level consists of four models allocated to the four vital signs, Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP), Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP), Heart Rate (HR) and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) in order to learn the spatiotemporal patterns of each vital sign. Additionally, a higher level is introduced to learn spatiotemporal patterns of the anomalous data point detected from the four vital signs. The proposed hierarchical organisation improves the model’s performance by using the semantically improved representation of the sensed data because patterns learned at each level of the hierarchy are reused when combined in novel ways at higher levels. To investigate and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, several data selection techniques are studied, and accordingly, a total record of 247 elderly patients is extracted from the MIMIC-III clinical database. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated and compared against several state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms using both online and traditional metrics. The proposed framework achieved 83% NAB score which outperforms the HTM and k-NN algorithms by 15%, the HBOS and INFLO SVD by 16% and the k-NN PCA by 21% while the SVM scored 34%. The results prove that multiple HTM networks can achieve better performance when dealing with multi-dimensional data, i.e. data collected from more than one source/sensor