Pushan Bhattacherjee

Bio: Pushan Bhattacherjee is an academic researcher from Heritage Institute of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Steganography. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 3 publications receiving 2 citations.

A Brief Survey of Steganographic Methods for ECG Signal

Abstract: The following paper represents a survey of steganography techniques suitable for usage in ECG. A few steganographic methods have been discussed below, it has been believed that these methods can be exploited to bring out more techniques suitable for ECG. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of existing steganographic techniques for ECG.

How Successful is a Lockdown During a Pandemic

Abstract: Social distancing, leading to lockdown, has been followed as a measure to restrict the spread of COVID-19 infection in almost every country. In this paper, we study the impact of the United States of America's lockdown measures during this pandemic in restricting the spread of infection. We have split the lockdown into two types - hard lockdown and soft lockdown. A hard lockdown is defined as the period when only essential services are provided. On the other hand, in the soft lockdown period, non-essential services are allowed, but with prevailing social distancing measures. Our findings suggest that a properly implemented Hard Lockdown followed by a soft Lockdown is indeed effective in reducing the reproduction number (R 0 ). Although R 0 increases during the soft lockdown, the rate of increase is restricted if the hard lockdown was implemented favorably. As exceptions to this general trend, we have observed that in Washington state Hard Lockdown has failed to reduce R 0 , and Vermont’s soft lockdown implementation was successful in controlling the increase in R 0 post-Hard Lockdown.

Effect of Climatic Conditions on Gender Segregated COVID-19 Infections and Fatalities

Abstract: In this paper, a sex-segregated study of COVID-19 infected patients and casualties is done for different climatic conditions We study the COVID data to identify the trend of infections and casualties based on the change in temperature and other climatic features The countries with non-homogeneous climates are broken down into respective subdivisions which consist of uniform climate It is found that, with an increase in temperature, the sex ratio in COVID-19 infected patients and especially casualties become more disproportionate Males have a higher mortality rate and the susceptibility of females decreases as we move from a cold to a hot climate

Improved ECG Watermarking Technique Using Curvelet Transform.

Abstract: Hiding data in electrocardiogram signals are a big challenge due to the embedded information that can hamper the accuracy of disease detection. On the other hand, hiding data into ECG signals provides more security for, and authenticity of, the patient’s data. Some recent studies used non-blind watermarking techniques to embed patient information and data of a patient into ECG signals. However, these techniques are not robust against attacks with noise and show a low performance in terms of parameters such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), normalized correlation (NC), mean square error (MSE), percentage residual difference (PRD), bit error rate (BER), structure similarity index measure (SSIM). In this study, an improved blind ECG-watermarking technique is proposed to embed the information of the patient’s data into the ECG signals using curvelet transform. The Euclidean distance between every two curvelet coefficients was computed to cluster the curvelet coefficients and after this, data were embedded into the selected clusters. This was an improvement not only in terms of extracting a hidden message from the watermarked ECG signals, but also robust against image-processing attacks. Performance metrics of SSIM, NC, PSNR and BER were used to measure the superiority of presented work. KL divergence and PRD were also used to reveal data hiding in curvelet coefficients of ECG without disturbing the original signal. The simulation results also demonstrated that the clustering method in the curvelet domain provided the best performance—even when the hidden messages were large size.

Do COVID-19 Lock-Downs Affect Business Cycle? Analysis Using Energy Consumption Cycle Clock for Selected European Countries

Abstract: On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared the COVID-19 epidemic to be a global pandemic. This was a consequence of the rapid increase in the number of people with positive test results, the increase in deaths due to COVID-19, and the lack of pharmaceutical drugs. Governments introduced national lockdowns, which have impacted both energy consumption and economies. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following question: do COVID-19 lockdowns affect the business cycle? We used the cycle clock approach to assess the magnitude of decrease in electricity consumption in the three waves of the epidemic, namely, April 2020, November 2021, and April 2021. Additionally, we checked the relation between energy consumption and GDP by means of spectral analysis. Results for selected 28 European countries confirm an impact of the introduced non-pharmaceutical interventions on both energy consumption and business cycle. The reduction of restrictions in subsequent pandemic waves increased electricity consumption, which suggests movement out of the economic recession.

An Efficient Encryption-Authentication Scheme for Electrocardiogram Data using the 3DES and Water Cycle Optimization Algorithm

Abstract: To share the recorded ECG data with the cardiologist in Golden Hours in an efficient and secured manner via tele-cardiology may save the lives of the population residing in rural areas of a country. This paper proposes an encryption-authentication scheme for secure the ECG data. The main contribution of this work is to generate a one-time padding key and deploying an encryption algorithm in authentication mode to achieve encryption and authentication. This is achieved by a water cycle optimization algorithm that generates a completely random one-time padding key and Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) algorithm for encrypting the ECG data. To validate the accuracy of the proposed encryption authentication scheme, experimental results were performed on standard ECG data and various performance parameters were calculated for it. The results show that the proposed algorithm improves security and passes the statistical key generation test.

Balancing Public & Economic Health in Japan during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Descriptive Analysis

Abstract: Despite loose restrictions and a low mortality rate due to COVID-19, Japan faced the challenge of stabilizing its economy during the pandemic. Here, we analyzed how the Japanese government attempted to maintain a balance between the health of the population and the health of the economy. We used a mix of quantitative data, information from policy documents, and news agency publications. Features of the Japanese government’s handling of the pandemic include the lack of constitutional authority to enforce a lockdown, the laxer restrictions compared with other countries in which citizens were advised only to exercise self-restraint and avoid close social contact, and the existence of expert panels that had only an advisory role. Our findings address the slow initial response of the government, which feared that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics would be canceled, and the increased testing when the Olympics were postponed, as well as the expansion of vaccination efforts after the Olympics. In addition, there was a targeted campaign to promote national travel to increase economic revenue in the tourism sector, but this led to an increase in COVID-19 cases.