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Internet of things (IoT) is a concept that is currently gaining a lot of popularity as a result of its potential to be incorporated into many heterogeneous systems. Because of its diversity, integrating IoT is conceivable in almost all fields, including the healthcare sector. For instance, a promising technology in the healthcare sector known as wireless body area network (WBAN) could be integrated with the IoT to enhance its productivity. However, in order to guarantee the optimization of the operation of the healthcare applications facilitated by the WBAN-enabled IoT technology, there must be enough support from all the different protocol stack layers so as to satisfy the critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the WBAN systems. Consequently, the medium access control (MAC) protocol has recently been gaining lots of attention in the area of WBANs due to its ability to manage and coordinate when a shared communication channel can be accessed. For the purpose of achieving efficient MAC protocols for WBAN-enabled IoT technology, this paper investigates some key MAC protocols that could be exploited in WBANs based on their characteristics, service specifications, technical issues such as energy wastage issues, and possible technical solutions were provided to enhance energy efficiency, channel utilization, data transmission rate, and dealy rate. Also, these MAC protocols were grouped and compared based on short- and long-range communication standards. Following this, future directions and open research issues are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face recognition is an efficient technique and one of the most preferred biometric modalities for the identification and verification of individuals as compared to voice, fingerprint, iris, retina eye scan, gait, ear and hand geometry. This has over the years necessitated researchers in both the academia and industry to come up with several face recognition techniques making it one of the most studied research area in computer vision. A major reason why it remains a fast-growing research lies in its application in unconstrained environments, where most existing techniques do not perform optimally. Such conditions include pose, illumination, ageing, occlusion, expression, plastic surgery and low resolution. In this paper, a critical review on the different issues of face recognition systems are presented, and different approaches to solving these issues are analyzed by presenting existing techniques that have been proposed in the literature. Furthermore, the major and challenging face datasets that consist of the different facial constraints which depict real-life scenarios are also discussed stating the shortcomings associated with them. Also, recognition performance on the different datasets by researchers are also reported. The paper is concluded, and directions for future works are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]