Department of Psychology, SRM University, AP-Andhra Pradesh organised a guest lecture on the topic “Prospective Memory and Aging in Medication Adherence: An Experimental Investigation” on January 27, 2022, from 3:30 to 4:30 pm. Dr Azizuddin Khan, Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai, attended the session as the eminent speaker.

The session started with a brief introduction of Prof Khan by Mrs Ayesha Parveen Haroon, Lecturer, Department of Psychology. Thereafter, Prof Khan delivered his lecture wherein he deliberated upon the medical adherence, aging and prospective memory as well as the factors affecting medical adherence. Specifically, he emphasised the effect of memory and intellectual abilities on medical adherence. Following Prof Khan’s presentation, the questions raised by the audience were communicated to Prof Khan by Dr Aehsan Ahmad Dar, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology. Prof Khan provided interesting insights on the questions raised. The programme ended with the vote of thanks delivered by Dr Ninad Patwardhan, Assistant Professor and Faculty Coordinator, Department of Psychology.

Dr Aqsa Agha, Assistant Professor, the Department of History, has been awarded the South Asia Public Health Fellowship Project by The Institute of Public Health (India) in collaboration with the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. As the South Asia Public Health Fellow-India, Dr Agha is expected to conduct research on the ethics of the tobacco industry and submit the report over a period of 8 months, i.e. from December 01, 2021, to July 31, 2022. She has been granted an amount of USD 6660 to carry out the project.

Along with producing a quality case study on India focusing on industry interferences promoting the tobacco epidemic and undermining public policies related to tobacco control, the project entails drafting the regional report on South Asia. It will bring together country-level case studies and implications between December-May, 2022, engaging in the dissemination of the country-level case studies with relevant stakeholders in June-July 2022.

Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) acts as a treaty for ratified countries to protect their citizens against the commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry as per guidelines laid down in the said article. Countries of South Asia, including India, have signed and fully ratified this treaty in the early 2000s. However, the lack of robust national policies and continued influence of the tobacco industry perpetuates the tobacco epidemic, as established in the available literature. Given each country’s mandate to protect the health of its citizens, there is a growing need to understand issues of tobacco industry interferences that undermine public policies meant to protect its population. The South Asian Public Health Fellowship is an initiative to generate knowledge regarding issues of tobacco industry interference not only in India but in other countries of South Asia (i.e., Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) to better understand such issues from a regional perspective.

Dr Aqsa Agha holds a PhD in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. She is also the Project Head of Unnat Bharat Abhiyan at SRM University-AP. Before joining SRM University-AP, Dr Agha was a Consultant with Partners in Change, New Delhi and prepared a report titled “Status of Corporate Responsibility in India, 2020”, focusing on corporate responsibility and ethical business practices. Prior to that, she worked as a Research Officer for National Research Study on Human Trafficking in India at TISS, Mumbai. Before TISS, she worked with the Human Rights Defenders’ Alert- India on human rights violations on the India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal. Along with teaching, she has consulted with organisations, including the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, where she conducted sessions with grassroots activists to effectively observe, analyse and document reality through participatory research. Her broader research interest lies in historical processes and their impact on the social locations of class, caste and gender.

SRM University-AP promotes translational research that can add value to society making lives better. Following the tradition, Dr Priyanka Singh, Assistant Professor and her PhD student Ms Jyothsna Devi from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering have published their recent research work “Region-based Hybrid Medical Image Watermarking Scheme for Robust and Secured Transmission in IoMT” in ‘IEEE Access journal’ (Impact Factor of 3.36).

Dr Priyanka’s research focuses on the healthcare industry that is rapidly transforming medical images into ones that operate in real-time environments (IoMT, IoT, Cloud and so on). The research is proposed to address security and integrity issues in medical image transmission on IoT and edge healthcare applications with a lossless reversible region-based MIW scheme.

In this era of technological advancement, medical images and patient information are widely transmitted through a public transmission channel on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) applications. While sharing medical images or electronic patient records (EPR) through a public network, they can get tampered with or manipulated, leading to the wrong diagnosis by the medical consultants. Confidentiality of the patient record is also a major concern. Thus, it is very important to ensure the authenticity, authorisation, integrity, and confidentiality of the information during transmission.

ABSTRACT:

With the growth in Internet and digital technology, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and Telemedicine have become buzzwords in healthcare. A large number of medical images and information are shared through a public network in these applications. This paper proposes a region-based hybrid Medical Image Watermarking (MIW) scheme to ensure the authenticity, authorisation, integrity, and confidentiality of the medical images transmitted through a public network in IoMT. In the proposed scheme, the medical image is segmented into Region of Interest (RoI) and Region of Non-Interest (RoNI).

RoI tamper detection and recovery bits are embedded in RoI to ensure the integrity of the medical image. RoI is watermarked using adaptive Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution with respect to the hiding capacity map for higher RoI imperceptibility and accuracy in tamper detection and recovery. Electronic Patient Record (EPR) is compressed using Huffman coding and encrypted using a pseudo-random key (secret key) to provide higher confidentiality and payload. Encrypted EPR, QR code of hospital logo and RoI recovery bits are embedded in RoNI using Discrete Wavelet Transform-Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD) hybrid transforms to achieve a robust watermark.

The proposed scheme is tested under various geometric and non-geometric attacks such as filtering, compression, rotation, salt and pepper noise and shearing. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has high imperceptibility, robustness, security, payload, tamper detection, and recovery accuracy under image processing attacks. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be used in the transmission of medical images and EPR in IoMT. The relevance of the proposed scheme is established by its superior performance in comparison to some of the popular existing schemes.

The International Relations and Higher Studies Office is organising a virtual Open House Session on February 16, 2022, from 11.30 am to 1.00 pm for all the students of SRM University-AP.

Topics to be covered in the session:

Semester Exchange Programmes
Higher Studies Abroad
International Internships
Scholarships, and many more!

Register Here

The programme will give an introduction and orientation to the students on the various activities initiated by the Office of International Relations Higher Studies. Learn about universities, applications, scholarships and more for STEM, Liberal Arts and Business Management courses.

All are invited to join the session on February 16, 2022, at 11.30 am.

Depression is one of the most gripping issues. It is overwhelming but not unbeatable. Join this next session of student counselling with Ms Sridevi Srinath brought to you by the Department of Student Affairs to gain better knowledge of your mental health and how to take care of your mind just as we take care of our bodies.

Date: February 04-05, 2022

Time: 6.00 pm-7.00 pm IST

Continue reading →