Digital Twins in Healthcare: An Architectural Proposal and Its Application in a Social Distancing Case Study.

The digital transformation process fostered by the development of Industry 4.0 technologies has largely affected the health sector, increasing diagnostic capabilities and improving drug effectiveness and treatment delivery. The Digital Twin (DT) technology, based on the virtualization of physical assets/processes and on a bidirectional communication between the digital and physical space for data exchange, is considered a game changer in modern health systems. Digital Twin applications in healthcare are various, ranging from virtualization of hospitals' physical spaces/organizational processes to individuals' physiological/genetic/lifestyle characteristics replication, and include the modeling of public health-related processes for monitoring, optimization and planning purposes. In this paper, motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic, we focus on the application of the Digital Twin technology for virus containment on the workplace through social distancing. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: i) we review the existing literature on the adoption of the Digital Twin technology in the healthcare domain, and propose a classification of DT applications into four categories; ii) we propose a generalized Digital Twin architecture that can be used as reference to identify the main functional components of a Digital Twin system; iii) we present CanTwin, a real-life industrial case study developed by Hitachi and representing the Digital Twin of a canteen service serving 1100 workers, set up for social distancing monitoring, queue inspection, people counting and tracking, table occupancy supervision.

Interoperable Blockchains for Highly-Integrated Supply Chains in Collaborative Manufacturing.

Blockchain technology plays a pivotal role in the undergoing fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. It is considered a tremendous boost to company digitalization; thus, considerable investments in blockchain are being made. However, there is no single blockchain technology, but various solutions exist, and they cannot interoperate with one each other. The ecosystem envisioned by the Industry 4.0 does not have centralized management or leading organization, so a single blockchain solution cannot be imposed. The various organizations hold their own blockchains, which must interoperate seamlessly. Despite some solutions for blockchain interoperability being proposed, the problem is still open. This paper aims to devise a secure solution for blockchain interoperability. The proposed approach consists of a relay scheme based on Trusted Execution Environment to provide higher security guarantees than the current literature. In particular, the proposed solution adopts an off-chain secure computation element invoked by a smart contract on a blockchain to securely communicate with its peered counterpart. A prototype has been implemented and used for the performance assessment, e.g., to measure the latency increase due to cross-blockchain interactions. The achieved and reported experimental results show that the proposed security solution introduces an additional latency that is entirely tolerable for transactions. At the same time, the usage of the Trusted Execution Environment imposes a negligible overhead.