Wearable devices provide an alternative pathway to clinical diagnostics by exploiting various physical, chemical and biological sensors to mine physiological (biophysical and/or biochemical) information in real time (preferably, continuously) and in a non-invasive or minimally invasive manner. These sensors can be worn in the form of glasses, jewellery, face masks, wristwatches, fitness bands, tattoo-like devices, bandages or other patches, and textiles. Wearables such as smartwatches have already proved their capability for the early detection and monitoring of the progression and treatment of various diseases, such as COVID-19 and Parkinson disease, through biophysical signals. Next-generation wearable sensors that enable the multimodal and/or multiplexed measurement of physical parameters and biochemical markers in real time and continuously could be a transformative technology for diagnostics, allowing for high-resolution and time-resolved historical recording of the health status of an individual. In this Review, we examine the building blocks of such wearable sensors, including the substrate materials, sensing mechanisms, power modules and decision-making units, by reflecting on the recent developments in the materials, engineering and data science of these components. Finally, we synthesize current trends in the field to provide predictions for the future trajectory of wearable sensors. 

/pdf/end-to-end-design-of-wearable-sensors-1qoptprj.pdf

End-to-end design of wearable sensors

Anonymization is a practical solution for preserving user’s privacy in data publishing. Data owners such as hospitals, banks, social network (SN) service providers, and insurance companies anonymize their user’s data before publishing it to protect the privacy of users whereas anonymous data remains useful for legitimate information consumers. Many anonymization models, algorithms, frameworks, and prototypes have been proposed/developed for privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP). These models/algorithms anonymize users’ data which is mainly in the form of tables or graphs depending upon the data owners. It is of paramount importance to provide good perspectives of the whole information privacy area involving both tabular and SN data, and recent anonymization researches. In this paper, we presents a comprehensive survey about SN (i.e., graphs) and relational (i.e., tabular) data anonymization techniques used in the PPDP. We systematically categorize the existing anonymization techniques into relational and structural anonymization, and present an up to date thorough review on existing anonymization techniques and metrics used for their evaluation. Our aim is to provide deeper insights about the PPDP problem involving both graphs and tabular data, possible attacks that can be launched on the sanitized published data, different actors involved in the anonymization scenario, and major differences in amount of private information contained in graphs and relational data, respectively. We present various representative anonymization methods that have been proposed to solve privacy problems in application-specific scenarios of the SNs. Furthermore, we highlight the user’s re-identification methods used by malevolent adversaries to re-identify people uniquely from the privacy preserved published data. Additionally, we discuss the challenges of anonymizing both graphs and tabular data, and elaborate promising research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically cover recent PPDP techniques involving both SN and relational data, and it provides a solid foundation for future studies in the PPDP field.

Anonymization Techniques for Privacy Preserving Data Publishing: A Comprehensive Survey

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc globally and still persists even after a year of its initial outbreak. Several reasons can be considered: people are in close contact with each other, i.e., at a short range (1 m), and the healthcare system is not sufficiently developed or does not have enough facilities to manage and fight the pandemic, even in developed countries such as the USA and the U.K. and countries in Europe. There is a great need in healthcare for remote monitoring of COVID-19 symptoms. In the past year, a number of IoT-based devices and wearables have been introduced by researchers, providing good results in terms of high accuracy in diagnosing patients in the prodromal phase and in monitoring the symptoms of patients, i.e., respiratory rate, heart rate, temperature, etc. In this systematic review, we analyzed these wearables and their need in the healthcare system. The research was conducted using three databases: IEEE Xplore®, Web of Science®, and PubMed Central®, between December 2019 and June 2021. This article was based on the PRISMA guidelines. Initially, 1100 articles were identified while searching the scientific literature regarding this topic. After screening, ultimately, 70 articles were fully evaluated and included in this review. These articles were divided into two categories. The first one belongs to the on-body sensors (wearables), their types and positions, and the use of AI technology with ehealth wearables in different scenarios from screening to contact tracing. In the second category, we discuss the problems and solutions with respect to utilizing these wearables globally. This systematic review provides an extensive overview of wearable systems for the remote management and automated assessment of COVID-19, taking into account the reliability and acceptability of the implemented technologies.

The Rise of Wearable Devices during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review.

The field of information security and privacy is currently attracting a lot of research interest. Simultaneously, different computing paradigms from Cloud computing to Edge computing are already forming a unique ecosystem with different architectures, storage, and processing capabilities. The heterogeneity of this ecosystem comes with certain limitations, particularly security and privacy challenges. This systematic literature review aims to identify similarities, differences, main attacks, and countermeasures in the various paradigms mentioned. The main determining outcome points out the essential security and privacy threats. The presented results also outline important similarities and differences in Cloud, Edge, and Fog computing paradigms. Finally, the work identified that the heterogeneity of such an ecosystem does have issues and poses a great setback in the deployment of security and privacy mechanisms to counter security attacks and privacy leakages. Different deployment techniques were found in the review studies as ways to mitigate and enhance security and privacy shortcomings.

/pdf/a-survey-of-security-in-cloud-edge-and-fog-computing-1j98hvhh.pdf

A Survey of Security in Cloud, Edge, and Fog Computing

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has clearly shown that major challenges and threats for humankind need to be addressed with global answers and shared decisions. Data and their analytics are crucial components of such decision-making activities. Rather interestingly, one of the most difficult aspects is reusing and sharing of accurate and detailed clinical data collected by Electronic Health Records (EHR), even if these data have a paramount importance. EHR data, in fact, are not only essential for supporting day-by-day activities, but also they can leverage research and support critical decisions about effectiveness of drugs and therapeutic strategies. In this paper, we will concentrate our attention on collaborative data infrastructures to support COVID-19 research and on the open issues of data sharing and data governance that COVID-19 had made emerge. Data interoperability, healthcare processes modelling and representation, shared procedures to deal with different data privacy regulations, and data stewardship and governance are seen as the most important aspects to boost collaborative research. Lessons learned from COVID-19 pandemic can be a strong element to improve international research and our future capability of dealing with fast developing emergencies and needs, which are likely to be more frequent in the future in our connected and intertwined world.

Health informatics and EHR to support clinical research in the COVID-19 pandemic: an overview.

A Survey on Wearable Technology: History, State-of-the-Art and Current Challenges

Some of the recent developments in data science for worldwide disease control have involved research of large-scale feasibility and usefulness of digital contact tracing, user location tracking, and proximity detection on users’ mobile devices or wearables. A centralized solution relying on collecting and storing user traces and location information on a central server can provide more accurate and timely actions than a decentralized solution in combating viral outbreaks, such as COVID-19. However, centralized solutions are more prone to privacy breaches and privacy attacks by malevolent third parties than decentralized solutions, storing the information in a distributed manner among wireless networks. Thus, it is of timely relevance to identify and summarize the existing privacy-preserving solutions, focusing on decentralized methods, and analyzing them in the context of mobile device-based localization and tracking, contact tracing, and proximity detection. Wearables and other mobile Internet of Things devices are of particular interest in our study, as not only privacy, but also energy-efficiency, targets are becoming more and more critical to the end-users. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of user location-tracking, proximity-detection, and digital contact-tracing solutions in the literature from the past two decades, analyses their advantages and drawbacks concerning centralized and decentralized solutions, and presents the authors’ thoughts on future research directions in this timely research field.

https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/5/4/87/pdf

Survey of Decentralized Solutions with Mobile Devices for User Location Tracking, Proximity Detection, and Contact Tracing in the COVID-19 Era

This article proposes a systematic review of privacy in indoor positioning systems. The selected 41 articles on location privacy preserving mechanisms employ non-inherently private methods such as encryption, k-anonymity, and differential privacy. The 15 identified mechanisms are categorized and summarized by where they are processed: on device, during transmission, or at a server. Trade-offs such as calculation speed, granularity, or complexity in set-up are identified for each mechanism. In 40% of the papers, some trade-offs are minimized by combining several methods into a hybrid solution. The combinations of mechanisms and their levels of offered privacy are suggested based on estimated user mobility cases.

/pdf/privacy-in-indoor-positioning-systems-a-systematic-review-4yo86aewfn.pdf

Sylvia Holcer

Papers

A Survey on Wearable Technology: History, State-of-the-Art and Current Challenges

Survey of Decentralized Solutions with Mobile Devices for User Location Tracking, Proximity Detection, and Contact Tracing in the COVID-19 Era

Privacy in Indoor Positioning Systems: A Systematic Review