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Medical image analysis is critical for diagnosing and planning treatments, particularly in addressing heart disease, a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Precise segmentation of the left atrium, a key structure in cardiac imaging, is essential for detecting conditions such as atrial fibrillation, heart failure, and stroke. However, its complex anatomy, subtle boundaries, and inter-patient variations make accurate segmentation challenging for traditional methods. Recent advancements in deep learning, especially semantic segmentation, have shown promise in addressing these limitations by enabling detailed, pixel-wise classification. This study proposes a novel segmentation framework Adaptive Multiscale U-Net (AMU-Net) combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformer-based encoder–decoder architectures. The framework introduces a Contextual Dynamic Encoder (CDE) for extracting multi-scale features and capturing long-range dependencies. An Adaptive Feature Decoder Block (AFDB), leveraging an Adaptive Feature Attention Block (AFAB) improves boundary delineation. Additionally, a Spectral Synthesis Fusion Head (SFFH) synthesizes spectral and spatial features, enhancing segmentation performance in low-contrast regions. To ensure robustness, data augmentation techniques such as rotation, scaling, and flipping are applied. Laplacian approximation is employed for uncertainty estimation, enabling interpretability and identifying regions of low confidence. Our proposed model achieves a Dice score of 93.35, a Precision of 94.12, and a Recall of 92.78, outperforming existing methods.

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has revolutionized various industries by allowing data collection, analysis, and decision-making in real time through interconnected devices. However, challenges arise in implementing Federated Learning (FL) in heterogeneous industrial IoT environments, such as maintaining model accuracy with non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) datasets and straggler IoT devices, ensuring computation and communication efficiency, and addressing weight aggregation issues. In this study, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Federated Reinforcement Learning (UA-FedRL) method that dynamically selects epochs of individual clients to effectively manage heterogeneous industrial IoT devices and improve accuracy, computation, and communication efficiency. Additionally, we introduce the Predictive Weighted Average Aggregation (PWA) method to tackle weight aggregation issues in heterogeneous industrial IoT scenarios by adjusting the weights of individual models based on their quality. The UA-FedRL addresses the inherent complexities and challenges of implementing FL in heterogeneous industrial IoT environments. Extensive simulations in complex IoT environments demonstrate the superior performance of UA-FedRL on both MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets compared to other existing approaches in terms of accuracy, communication efficiency, and computation efficiency. The UA-FedRL algorithm attain an accuracy of 96.83% on the MNIST dataset and 62.75% on the CIFAR-10 dataset, despite the presence of 90% straggler IoT devices, attesting to its robust performance and adaptability in different datasets.

Over the past few years, life expectancy has increased significantly. However, elderly individuals living independently often require assistance due to mobility issues, symptoms of dementia, or other health-related challenges. In these situations, high-quality elderly care systems for the aging population require innovative approaches to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). Traditional remote elderly care methods face several challenges, including high latency and poor service quality, which affect their transparency and stability. This paper proposes an Edge Computational Intelligence (ECI)-based haptic-driven ECI-TeleCaring system for the remote caring and monitoring of elderly people. It utilizes a Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to reduce latency and enhance responsiveness. Dual Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models are deployed at the edge to enable real-time location-aware activity prediction to ensure QoS and QoE. The results from the simulation demonstrate that the proposed system is proficient in managing the transmission of data in real time without and with an activity recognition and location-aware model by communication latency under 2.5 ms (more than 60%) and from 11∼12 ms (60∼95%) for 10 to 1000 data packets, respectively. The results also show that the proposed system ensures a trade-off between the transparency and stability of the system from the QoS and QoE perspectives. Moreover, the proposed system serves as a testbed for implementing, investigating, and managing elder telecaring services for QoS/QoE provisioning. It facilitates real-time monitoring of the deployed technological parameters along with network delay and packet loss, and it oversees data exchange between the master domain (human operator) and slave domain (telerobot).

The Tactile Internet has become a revolution for Internet technology, greatly improving the transmission of skill sets (audio, video, text, and haptics) over communication channels compared with traditional triple-play data (audio, video, text). It is a strong candidate to support next-generation delay-sensitive and loss-intolerant smart applications. However, stringent requirements for the Tactile Internet, including ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high availability, and ultra-security, present critical challenges to ensure Quality of Service (QoS). Consequently, several approaches have been proposed to meet these QoS requirements. This article reviews QoS provisioning approaches for the Tactile Internet. First, we present key concepts for the fifth-generation and beyond technologies, Tactile Internet, and haptic communication. Second, we discuss the Tactile Internet use cases along with strict QoS requirements. Third, we classify existing solutions, including haptic codecs, control system designs, hybrid schemes, and intelligent prediction models; provide in-depth discussion regarding these approaches to improve QoS for the Tactile Internet applications; and investigate strengths and weaknesses for each proposed solution. Finally, we present open research challenges and discuss potential future research avenues to realize the Tactile Internet services.

Advancements in adaptive educational technologies, specifically the adaptive learning system, have made it possible to automatically optimize the sequencing of the pedagogical instructions according to the needs of individual learners. The crux of such systems lies in the instructional sequencing policy, which recommends personalized learning material based on the learning experiences of the learner to maximize their learning outcomes. However, limited available information such as cognitive, affective states, and competence levels of the learners ongoing knowledge points servers critical challenges to optimizing individual-specific pedagogical instructions in real-time. Moreover, making such decisions policy for every learner with a unique knowledge profile demands a trade-off between learner current knowledge and curiosity to learn next knowledge point. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a personalized adaptability knowledge extraction strategy (PAKES) using cognitive diagnosis and reinforcement learning (RL). We apply the general diagnostic model to track the current knowledge state of the learners. Subsequently, an RL-based Q-learning algorithm is employed to recommend optimal pedagogical instructions for individuals to meet their learning objectives while maintaining equilibrium among the learner-control and teaching trajectories. The results indicate that the learning analytics of the proposed framework can fairly deliver the optimal pedagogical paths for the learners based upon their learning profiles. A 62% learning progress score was achieved with the pedagogical paths recommended by the PAKES, showing a 20% improvement compared to the baseline model.

With the advancement in next-generation communication technologies, the so-called Tactile Internet is getting more attention due to its smart applications, such as haptic-enabled teleoperation systems. The stringent requirements such as delay, jitter, and packet loss of these delay-sensitive and loss-intolerant applications make it more challenging to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). In this regard, different haptic codec and control schemes were proposed for QoS and QoE provisioning in the Tactile Internet. However, they maximize the QoE while degrading the system’s stability under varying delays and high packet rates. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning-based Intelligent Tactile Edge (ITE) framework to ensure both transparency and stability of teleoperation systems with high packet rates and variable time delay communication networks. The proposed ITE first estimates the network challenges, including communication delay, jitter, and packet loss, and then utilizes a Q-learning algorithm to select the optimal haptic codec scheme to reduce network load. The proposed framework aims to explore the optimal relationship between QoS and QoE parameters and make the tradeoff between stability and transparency during teleoperations. The simulation result indicates that the proposed strategy chooses the optimal scheme under different network impairments corresponding to the congestion level in the communication network while improving the QoS and maximizing the QoE. The end-to-end performance of throughput (1.5 Mbps) and average RTT (70 ms) during haptic communication is achieved with a learning rate and discounted factor value of 0.5 and 0.8, respectively. The results indicate that the communication system can successfully achieve the QoS and QoE requirements by employing the proposed ITE framework.

With the inclusion of tactile Internet (TI) in the industrial sector, we are at the doorstep of the tactile Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This provides the ability for the human operator to control and manipulate remote industrial environments in real-time. The TI use cases in IIoT demand a communication network, including ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, availability, and security. Additionally, the lack of the tactile IIoT testbed has made it more severe to investigate and improve the quality of services (QoS) for tactile IIoT applications. In this work, we propose a virtual testbed called IoTactileSim, that offers implementation, investigation, and management for QoS provisioning in tactile IIoT services. IoTactileSim utilizes a network emulator Mininet and robotic simulator CoppeliaSim to perform real-time haptic teleoperations in virtual and physical environments. It provides the real-time monitoring of the implemented technology parametric values, network impairments (delay, packet loss), and data flow between operator (master domain) and teleoperator (slave domain). Finally, we investigate the results of two tactile IIoT environments to prove the potential of the proposed IoTactileSim testbed.

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile network services are currently being made available for different use case scenarios like enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low latency communication, and massive machine-type communication. The ever-increasing data requests from the users have shifted the communication paradigm to be based on the type of the requested data content or the so-called information-centric networking (ICN). The ICN primarily aims to enhance the performance of the network infrastructure in terms of the stretch to opt for the best routing path. Reduction in stretch merely reduces the end-to-end (E2E) latency to ensure the requirements of the 5G-enabled tactile internet (TI) services. The foremost challenge tackled by the ICN-based system is to minimize the stretch while selecting an optimal routing path. Therefore, in this work, a reinforcement learning-based intelligent stretch optimization (ISO) strategy has been proposed to reduce stretch and obtain an optimal routing path in ICN-based systems for the realization of 5G-enabled TI services. A Q-learning algorithm is utilized to explore and exploit the different routing paths within the ICN infrastructure. The problem is designed as a Markov decision process and solved with the help of the Q-learning algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy finds the optimal routing path for the delay-sensitive haptic-driven services of 5G-enabled TI based upon their stretch profile over ICN, such as the augmented reality /virtual reality applications. Moreover, we compare and evaluate the simulation results of propsoed ISO strategy with random routing strategy and history aware routing protocol (HARP). The proposed ISO strategy reduces 33.33% and 33.69% delay as compared to random routing and HARP, respectively. Thus, the proposed strategy suggests an optimal routing path with lesser stretch to minimize the E2E latency.