Search results

This paper aims to review existing wireless sensor network (WSN) setups in various domains, focusing on affordable WSN so that it can be effectively utilised in solving the environmental problems. WSN is being explored in many applications such as home security, smart spaces, environmental monitoring, battlefield surveillance and target tracking. WSN consists of a number of tiny, low-powered, energy-constrained sensor nodes with sensing, data processing and wireless communication components. Creating a WSN setup will make the monitoring system effective and in future, it will give a roadmap for solving some common societal problems.

Various research papers in the area of WSN have been reviewed on the basis of technologies and application on different fields.

WSN was found to be the most effective solution in areas which are less explored due their hazardous nature and are difficult to reach.

This review is based on research papers available and a recent trend in the area of WSN has been explored.

In mobile banking (m-banking), knowing and understanding trust-related factors can enable bank managers to design suitable strategies for enhancing its overall uptake. Based on this premise, the present study assesses the relationship of trust in m-banking with technology acceptance and use factors, quality factors, risk factors and a personal factor as well as behavioral outcomes. The study further investigates the moderating influence of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions on these relationships.

The present study synthesizes the outcomes of 63 quantitative studies on trust in m-banking by using the meta-analysis technique.

The study finds a significant relationship of trust in m-banking with technology acceptance and use factors, quality factors, risk factors, a personal factor and behavioral outcomes. Additionally, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, namely power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity and uncertainty avoidance, significantly moderate the majority of the hypothesized relationships.

By reviewing the extant literature, this study provides a comprehensive framework that explains the antecedents and behavioral outcomes of trust in m-banking and determines how these relationships effectively vary across cultures.

The study helps m-banking service providers to understand how trust in m-banking can be enhanced. The study also shows which factors are more impactful in a particular culture.

This is an original study that contributes to the m-banking marketing literature.

Measuring patient satisfaction plays an increasingly important role in the growing push toward healthcare provider accountability. This study seeks to evaluate G.B. Pant Hospital (a North Indian tertiary care centre) patient satisfaction with clinical laboratory services.

A total of 100 out‐ and in‐patients were randomly selected and interviewed about microbiological services using a standard format, a method which can be easily used to compare patient satisfaction with laboratory services elsewhere.

Patients represented all age groups: females and males were balanced. Few were from poor socio‐economic backgrounds. Patients do not have problems getting tests done, but the laboratory's inconvenient location caused dissatisfaction. Patients do not have problems communicating with staff, but medical terms are not understood by patients. Hospital cleanliness needs improving, especially toilets, which causes the most patient dissatisfaction. Hospital staff were deemed highly competent and judged to give excellent technical help to patients. The questionnaire's financial subscale shows 100 per cent satisfaction because all tests in the microbiology department are free. The overall satisfaction with services stood at 83 per cent. Satisfaction scores for G.B. Pant Hospital appear to be satisfactory.

This study does not compare patient satisfaction in two or more hospitals and findings may not be generalisable.

Patient satisfaction surveys are the best way to identify deficiencies and improve hospital services. Repeating studies at six monthly intervals is a useful managerial intervention aimed at delivering and maintaining quality healthcare.

This laboratory satisfaction survey is the first of its kind for government hospitals in India. The survey revealed a positive feedback and helped to identify the areas of concern along with estimating the patient satisfaction scores. This is the best way to identify the areas of deficiencies and improving the services provided by the hospital. The authors feel that repeating such studies at a regular interval of six months would be a useful guide for the managerial interventions.

Introduction: Historically, the corporate governance (CG) framework was designed primarily to safeguard the economic interests of shareholders, as a result of political and legal interventions, developing into an effective instrument for stakeholders and society in general.

Purpose: The core objectives of the study include: identifying journals/publications responsible for publishing CG studies in India, key CG issues covered by CG researchers, the amount of high-impact CG literature across different time periods, sectors/industries covered by CG researchers and different research instruments (quantitative or qualitative) used in CG studies in India.

Design/methodology: The chapter used a sample of 130 corporate governance studies that fulfil the selection criteria, drawn from the repository of over 100 reputed journals that are either recognised by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) or indexed by SCOPUS. A systematic literature review has been carried out pertaining to CG issues in India, based on various statistical tools, data, industries, research outlets & citations, etc.

Findings: The results show an overwhelming number of studies have assessed the relationship between CG variables and firm performance, which could be measured through a variety of performance metrics such as ROA and ROI. Apart from empirical analysis, many conceptual studies use repetitive basic statistical tools like descriptive statistics or regression analysis. The chapter offers insights into current achievements and future development.

Originality/value: This bibliometric study is a useful guide for policymakers, corporate leaders, research organisations and management faculty to draw insights from work produced by eminent researchers in GC in India.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of employer branding strategy (a mechanism used by organisations to hire and retain competent talent) on employee engagement whilst simultaneously measuring the mediating effect of person-organisation (P-O) fit.

The study analyses a sample of 296 employees working in the BPO sector in India. The proposed model is tested with the help of structural equation modelling.

The findings of the research highlight that employer branding has an affirmative relationship with P-O fit and employee engagement. The findings also reveal that P-O effect has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between employer branding and employee engagement.

Understanding and implementing employer branding strategies provides the organisation with a tool for not only harnessing good employees but also facilitates them to engage and retain them. Employer branding strategies ensure an increase in employee’s sense of belongingness and alignment of goals. Value congruence in the form of person organisation fit also ensures that employees believe that they are valued across the organisation and may go an “extra mile” to achieve organisational objectives.

Employer branding is a comprehensive strategy which can be used by employers to attract and retain talented employees. In a global economy where a talented workforce is scarce and has plenty of choices available to them, firms can use employer branding as a strategic opportunity to enhance employee engagement.

The tea plantation industry is characterized by the large-scale deployment of cheap women laborers and gender-blind practices that make the social positions of women workers vulnerable. This paper considers women temporary workers in tea gardens to study the exacerbated impact of Covid-19 on their lives. The impact of the pandemic on marginal tea garden women laborers has not received enough attention from researchers; hence, the authors have studied the gendered implications of the pandemic on Adivasi temporary women workers in tea gardens in India. “Adivasi” is an umbrella term to refer to all indigenous tribes in India.

The authors conducted a qualitative study with 26 in-depth interviews with women temporary workers who identify themselves as Adivasis. For the discussion, the authors have mainly borrowed from intersectionality and subalternity literature.

The analysis explored the intersectional experiences of the women temporary workers (1) as members of Tea Tribes who are compelled to continue working at tea gardens as wage laborers, (2) job insecurities at work due to their temporary worker status, (3) disadvantages faced by women workers for their gender identity and (4) the gendered impact of the pandemic on their lives.

This study has explored the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of temporary women workers who belong to ethnic minority groups in the global south. The exploitation of labor rights in the tea industry during the pandemic has not been discussed enough by researchers earlier.

Oral health is an integral part of the general health, however, oral health has been given lower priority than other health problems especially among the underprivileged refugee population. Out of total refugees in the world, 70 percent of the refugees belong to Tibet. The purpose of this paper is to assess the dental caries status and treatment needs of Tibetans residing in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India and to explore and suggest better oral health care delivery to them.

Tibetans above the age of 12 years were included in this cross-sectional study. American Dental Association Type-3 examination was conducted. Data regarding demography and oral health practices was recorded on a structured format. For recording dental caries, dentition status and treatment need index was used. The data were analyzed using the SPSS statistical software. χ2 test, student t-test, and ANOVA test were used.

A total of 18,831 teeth were examined among which 82 percent were sound, 16.7 percent decayed, 0.7 percent were filled without decay, 0.1 percent filled with decay, 0.03 percent were bridge abutments and 0.15 percent teeth had traumatic injury. The mean DMFT was 7.3 and it was increasing with the age. Mean number of teeth requiring one surface filling, two or more surface filling, pulp therapy, and extraction was 1.27, 0.39, 0.21, and 2.08, respectively.

The study revealed low prevalence of dental caries among Tibetans and dental treatment requirement steadily increased with the advancement of age and was also related to other factors like poverty, education, and their tough life where oral health is given no priority.

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the leading cancer in the world, BC risk has been there for women of the middle age also, it is the malignant tumor. However, identifying BC in the early stage will save most of the women’s life. As there is an advancement in the technology research used Machine Learning (ML) algorithm Random Forest for ranking the feature, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naïve Bayes (NB) supervised classifiers for selection of best optimized features and prediction of BC accuracy. The estimation of prediction accuracy has been done by using the dataset Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data from University of California Irvine (UCI) ML repository. To perform all these operation, Anaconda one of the open source distribution of Python has been used. The proposed work resulted in extemporize improvement in the NB and SVM classifier accuracy. The performance evaluation of the proposed model is estimated by using classification accuracy, confusion matrix, mean, standard deviation, variance, and root mean-squared error.

The experimental results shows that 70-30 data split will result in best accuracy. SVM acts as a feature optimizer of 12 best features with the result of 97.66% accuracy and improvement of 1.17% after feature reduction. NB results with feature optimizer 17 of best features with the result of 96.49% accuracy and improvement of 1.17% after feature reduction.

The study shows that proposal model works very effectively as compare to the existing models with respect to accuracy measures.

This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of the existing protocols that address the security issues in the Future Internet (FI) and also to introduce a Collaborative Mutual Identity Establishment (CMIE) scheme which adopts the elliptical curve cryptography (ECC), to address the issues, such as content integrity, mutual authentication, forward secrecy, auditability and resistance to attacks such as denial-of-service (DoS) and replay attack.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the existing protocols that address the security issues in the FI and also provides a CMIE scheme, by adopting the ECC and digital signature verification mechanism, to address the issues, such as content integrity, mutual authentication, forward secrecy, auditability and resistance to attacks such as DoS and replay attack. The proposed scheme enables the establishment of secured interactions between devices and entities of the FI. Further, the algorithm is evaluated against Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Application (AVISPA) tool to verify the security solutions that the CMIE scheme has claimed to address to have been effectively achieved in reality.

The algorithm is evaluated against AVISPA tool to verify the security solutions that the CMIE scheme has claimed to address and proved to have been effectively achieved in reality. The proposed scheme enables the establishment of secured interactions between devices and entities of the FI.

Considering the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, another important aspect that is the device-to-location (D2L) aspect has not been considered in this protocol. Major focus of the protocol is centered around the device-to-device (D2D) and device-to-server (D2S) scenarios. Also, IoT basically works upon a confluence of hundreds for protocols that support the achievement of various factors in the IoT, for example Data Distribution Service, Message Queue Telemetry Transport, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and so on. Interoperability of the proposed CMIE algorithm with the existing protocols has to be considered to establish a complete model that fits the FI. Further, each request for mutual authentication requires a querying of the database and a computation at each of the participating entities side for verification which could take considerable amount of time. However, for applications that require firm authentication for maintaining and ensuring secure interactions between entities prior to access control and initiation of actual transfer of sensitive information, the negligible difference in computation time can be ignored for the greater benefit that comes with stronger security. Other factors such as quality of service (QoS) (i.e. flexibility of data delivery, resource usage and timing), key management and distribution also need to be considered. However, the user still has the responsibility to choose the required protocol that suits one’s application and serves the purpose.

The originality of the work lies in adopting the ECC and digital signature verification mechanism to develop a new scheme that ensures mutual authentication between participating entities in the FI based upon certain user information such as identities. ECC provides efficiency in terms of key size generated and security against main-in-middle attack. The proposed scheme provides secured interactions between devices/entities in the FI.