A Survey on Modality Characteristics, Performance Evaluation Metrics, and Security for Traditional and Wearable Biometric Systems

Biometric research is directed increasingly towards Wearable Biometric Systems (WBS) for user authentication and identification. However, prior to engaging in WBS research, how their operational dynamics and design considerations differ from those of Traditional Biometric Systems (TBS) must be understood. While the current literature is cognizant of those differences, there is no effective work that summarizes the factors where TBS and WBS differ, namely, their modality characteristics, performance, security and privacy. To bridge the gap, this paper accordingly reviews and compares the key characteristics of modalities, contrasts the metrics used to evaluate system performance, and highlights the divergence in critical vulnerabilities, attacks and defenses for TBS and WBS. It further discusses how these factors affect the design considerations for WBS, the open challenges and future directions of research in these areas. In doing so, the paper provides a big-picture overview of the important avenues of challenges and potential solutions that researchers entering the field should be aware of. Hence, this survey aims to be a starting point for researchers in comprehending the fundamental differences between TBS and WBS before understanding the core challenges associated with WBS and its design

Towards the internet of smart clothing: a review on IoT wearables and garments for creating intelligent connected e-textiles

[Abstract] Technology has become ubiquitous, it is all around us and is becoming part of us. Togetherwith the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and enabling technologies (e.g., Augmented Reality (AR), Cyber-Physical Systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain or edge computing), smart wearables and IoT-based garments can potentially have a lot of influence by harmonizing functionality and the delight created by fashion. Thus, smart clothes look for a balance among fashion, engineering, interaction, user experience, cybersecurity, design and science to reinvent technologies that can anticipate needs and desires. Nowadays, the rapid convergence of textile and electronics is enabling the seamless and massive integration of sensors into textiles and the development of conductive yarn. The potential of smart fabrics, which can communicate with smartphones to process biometric information such as heart rate, temperature, breathing, stress, movement, acceleration, or even hormone levels, promises a new era for retail. This article reviews the main requirements for developing smart IoT-enabled garments and shows smart clothing potential impact on business models in the medium-term. Specifically, a global IoT architecture is proposed, the main types and components of smart IoT wearables and garments are presented, their main requirements are analyzed and some of the most recent smart clothing applications are studied. In this way, this article reviews the past and present of smart garments in order to provide guidelines for the future developers of a network where garments will be connected like other IoT objects: the Internet of Smart Clothing.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2016-045Xunta de Galicia; ED341D R2016/012Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Agencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2013-47141-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2016-75067-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2015-69648-RED

A Survey Study of the Current Challenges and Opportunities of Deploying the ECG Biometric Authentication Method in IoT and 5G Environments

The environment prototype of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened the horizon for researchers to utilize such environments in deploying useful new techniques and methods in different fields and areas. The deployment process takes place when numerous IoT devices are utilized in the implementation phase for new techniques and methods. With the wide use of IoT devices in our daily lives in many fields, personal identification is becoming increasingly important for our society. This survey aims to demonstrate various aspects related to the implementation of biometric authentication in healthcare monitoring systems based on acquiring vital ECG signals via designated wearable devices that are compatible with 5G technology. The nature of ECG signals and current ongoing research related to ECG authentication are investigated in this survey along with the factors that may affect the signal acquisition process. In addition, the survey addresses the psycho-physiological factors that pose a challenge to the usage of ECG signals as a biometric trait in biometric authentication systems along with other challenges that must be addressed and resolved in any future related research.

Ambient Intelligence in Healthcare: A State-of-the-Art

Information technology advancement leads to an innovative paradigm called Ambient Intelligence (AmI). A digital environment is employed along with AmI to enable individuals to be aware to their behaviors, needs, emotions and gestures. Several applications of the AmI systems in healthcare environment attract several researchers. AmI is considered one of the recent technologies that support hospitals, patients, and specialists for personal healthcare with the aid of artificial intelligence techniques and wireless sensor networks. The improvement in the wearable devices, mobile devices, embedded software and wireless technologies open the doors to advanced applications in the AmI paradigm. The WSN and the BAN collect medical data to be used for the progress of the intelligent systems adapted inevitably. The current study outlines the AmI role in healthcare concerning with its relational and technological nature. Health

VLSI Implementation of an Efficient Lossless EEG Compression Design for Wireless Body Area Network

Data transmission of electroencephalography (EEG) signals over Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is currently a widely used system that comes together with challenges in terms of efficiency and effectivity. In this study, an effective Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design of lossless EEG compression circuit is proposed to increase both efficiency and effectivity of EEG signal transmission over WBAN. The proposed design was realized based on a novel lossless compression algorithm which consists of an adaptive fuzzy predictor, a voting-based scheme and a tri-stage entropy encoder. The tri-stage entropy encoder is composed of a two-stage Huffman and Golomb-Rice encoders with static coding table using basic comparator and multiplexer components. A pipelining technique was incorporated to enhance the performance of the proposed design. The proposed design was fabricated using a 0.18 μm CMOS technology containing 8405 gates with 2.58 mW simulated power consumption under an operating condition of 100 MHz clock speed. The CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database was used to test the performance of the proposed technique in terms of compression rate which yielded an average value of 2.35 for 23 channels. Compared with previously proposed hardware-oriented lossless EEG compression designs, this work provided a 14.6% increase in compression rate with a 37.3% reduction in hardware cost while maintaining a low system complexity

Human activity recognition: suitability of a neuromorphic approach for on-edge AIoT applications

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a classification problem involving time-dependent signals produced by body monitoring, and its application domain covers all the aspects of human life, from healthcare to sport, from safety to smart environments. As such, it is naturally well suited for on-edge deployment of personalized point-of-care (POC) analyses or other tailored services for the user. However, typical smart and wearable devices suffer from relevant limitations regarding energy consumption, and this significantly hinders the possibility for successful employment of edge computing for tasks like HAR. In this paper, we investigate how this problem can be mitigated by adopting a neuromorphic approach. By comparing optimized classifiers based on traditional deep neural network (DNN) architectures as well as on recent alternatives like the Legendre Memory Unit (LMU), we show how spiking neural networks (SNNs) can effectively deal with the temporal signals typical of HAR providing high performances at a low energy cost. By carrying out an application-oriented hyperparameter optimization, we also propose a methodology flexible to be extended to different domains, to enlarge the field of neuro-inspired classifier suitable for on-edge artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) applications